


Empire City

by Vee



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Detectives, Drug Dealing, M/M, Murder, Obsession, Prostitution, Recreational Drug Use, Rivalry, Serial Killers, Sibling Incest, Threesome - M/M/M, Underage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-04
Updated: 2008-07-06
Packaged: 2017-11-21 13:31:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 72,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/598299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vee/pseuds/Vee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This city is not without its secrets, from the sordid and personal to the sort of thing that would call down the wrath of God. Everyone's connected, whether they know it or not, and whether they like it or not. Where does the shiny surface end and the underbelly begin? Where do the respectable become the deplorable? Where is that place in between, where murderers, prostitutes, and drug dealers dictate their own class system, their own law? Well, that might just be here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inui

Money that changed hands through drug deals was categorically filthy, and the first thing I ordered Kaidoh to do was get that shit off of my table and out of the lab. Then I asked him to wash his hands before he re-entered the room. He chuntered something about me being ungrateful. How was it possible, I asked evenly as I listened to him shuffling off a few layers of grubby clothes in the bathroom, to be ungrateful in a symbiotic relationship?  
  
"Symbiotic." He repeated after me, deadpan, appearing in the doorway when I turned around. He was already toweling his hands off; he'd hardly given the water time to get hot.   
  
"Did you even use soap?"  
  
"Yes. Symbiotic?"  
  
I sighed deeply and held up one of the chalky yellow tablets to the light. Kaidoh would be the bane of my existence if he weren't also, mostly, the reason for it.  
  
"Never mind. How much do you think is in there?" I gestured back with one gloved hand, in the general direction of wherever he'd tossed the roll of sweaty bills.   
  
Kaidoh had stripped down to a black undershirt and his boxer shorts, was not riding any sort of buzz or high that I could immediately detect, and spoke almost shamefully. "Five hundred. Maybe six."   
  
I didn't respond, and he took that as explosively as if I'd made my frustrations vocal. I suppose my silences had more to say. He was moving closer as I adjusted my glasses and kept meting the tablets into color coded piles. They were all stamped with our little logo – a snake (it had been Kaidoh's idea) – and it was the first new batch I'd managed in months. A lot of money went into the production of decent-quality Ecstasy, and ever since I'd stopped with the crystal meth at our already all-too-generous landlord's insistence, money had been much more of a precious commodity. But anytime I talked about bringing another dealer into the operation, Kaidoh would rattle off the laundry list of Reasons Why That Was a Bad Idea. I couldn't help but agree, mostly because he looked so goddamned sexy when he was adamant.   
  
His sandals plopped against the recently-bleached tile floor as he moved closer. "Well, we're not exactly churning out anything new – and Kiki hasn't even stopped by yet! That should break us an even thousand for the night."   
  
"It's a Friday night." I said the words as if he needed to be reminded. I wasn't listening to him, really.   
  
"Hey, if you're insinuating something,"  _insinuating_ , that was an impressive word from Kaidoh. It sounded good in his voice, "I'd like to see you get out there and bust your ass once in a—"  
  
I turned when he was nearly on top of me, pulling off one surgical glove and holding up the tab to his face. "Are you high?" I leveled the question at him like the barrel of a gun, unmistakable and inescapable.  
  
Kaidoh's silences spoke sometimes, too. He glared at me, and eyed the little yellow thing between my fingers. The garish, neon lighting of the lab and all the white and stainless steel around us made him look even starker in contrast. Hair, eyes – every feature, actually, physical and metaphysical – very dark, thrown into dangerous disparity. We may have shared this dirty little kingdom, but the lab was obviously my domain. Well, he should have known better than to get so close. Part of symbiosis, I'd probably explain to him tomorrow when he was falling asleep (he wouldn't be doing that tonight), was doing your equal part.   
  
I knew he didn't fuck around with much these days; if Kaidoh feared anything, it was a habit, but he'd dodged the bullet on heroin and coke both. Some might have called it a strong constitution and a non-addictive personality, but the truth was that he couldn't stand the stretches of lethargy, of uselessness. That snake logo fit him rather well, and me too, to an extent. Constant motion, even in stillness. Kaidoh didn't like to slow down, didn't like to take breaks. So I never had understood why he harbored such a distaste for Ecstasy.   
  
"No. I'm not." He admitted. He'd wanted to lie so I wouldn't do what I did next. I stood up and he didn't even move back. The metal chair skidded back and we were hip-to-hip as I reached up for his mouth with my other, still-gloved hand.   
  
His acquiescence was an interesting thing, occasionally. He never initiated anything out of the ordinary, and with every breath he would claim he was not and never had been attracted to me, but there's something about a guy who lets you ply his mouth open so intimately and place an untested drug on his pink tongue. A guy who lets you close that mouth again and kiss those lips – softly, just once.   
  
"Get me some water." He said brusquely. I told him there was some in by the bed. We called it the bed but it was really a queen-sized mattress which was all the bed we needed and could afford at the moment. Kaidoh staggered off, tired for now, but already running a hand up over his face, through his coarse and shiny hair.  
  
Amazing that someone will still trust you implicitly after knowing The Facts. I didn’t like to lie to Kaidoh, but that wasn't the reason I told him things. I liked to unnerve him, to make him squirm, to see how far I could go before he abandoned our partnership and our perverted little friendship. Either that, or I wanted to see him angry enough to kill me.   
  
I liked to watch him on X because it made him smile, and it made him suggestible. His smile was beautiful, but his suggestibility was a thousand times so. He knew this, of course, but he didn't ever lose his shit in the mornings (or evenings, whenever he woke up depending on the day), knowing full well what advantage I'd taken of his state. The only other thing that made him look so docile and recalcitrant was sleep, and I watched him do that, too. I told him so. Why this shocked him more than the fucking, I'll try not to understand, but it's probably because he also knows I get off on it. On him, just lying there, sleeping.   
  
Though it's been a consideration before, I don't think there's anything truly psychotic in my nature. If I read a good thriller or watch a particularly gruesome Hammer horror flick, I'll sometimes wonder how easy it would be to kill someone, how enjoyable in the act and satisfying in the end. But only in the interest of theory. I was merely a drug designer, and why I'd never progressed beyond a home-made lab and into a real, honest-living, corporate one was because of the larceny thing when I was 18. I'd gotten out of jail soon enough, but it would forever keep me from using all those scholarships I'd racked up during high school. I had a wealth of knowledge and what had constantly been referred to as a brilliant scientific mind, but I'd never use it to any good end. Depending on how you defined good. I enjoyed my life, unseemly as it was. I enjoyed my drop-out roommate and former schoolmate writhing on the bed as I watched from the doorway, unaffected on the outside.   
  
Raging with the incalculable need to fuck him senseless, on the inside.   
  
"What did you put in this?" Half an hour in. He sat up on the bed and took a greedy swig from the oversized water bottle I'd provided. The bedroom was dark, but the light from the lab bled in, and I could make out the sharp whites of his eyes and the sheen of sweat on his body.   
  
"Nothing unusual." It was a Fact.  
  
"Shit. Shit. Shit." He laughed and rolled around on the mattress, which was least of the things we shared. His undershirt rolled up and my eyes were adjusting to the incongruity of the light. Kaidoh worked out a lot, giving him a healthy athletic physique, but I took special delight in these glimpses of his body in decidedly non-masculine postures. He was doing some sort of cat-stretch yoga thing on the bed, and laughing, and moaning, and for the first time I realized I'd left the radio on and some old Talking Heads song was playing. I watched his bared abdominal muscles roll as he breathed deeply in that prone position. It would have been so easy to walk over and violate him. So easy. Too easy.   
  
This shit was good, and we'd not lose a penny on it. It would move quickly and all I'd probably have to do was duplicate the recipe to keep business going – I kept extremely detailed notes, unlike the unprofessional fucks who failed in this business. It was good, but it was too good for Kaidoh, who wasn't a club kid out for a feckless night of pleasure. I preferred him more lucid, a little less rolling.   
  
"Jesus Christ. I gotta do something." He finally said, practically bouncing off the mattress, reaching me in a couple of strides, grabbing me, and kissing me hard.   
  
Well, that was unexpected. I pushed him away and he laughed, and moved in on me again, his strong fingers in my short hair, sparking electricity at the back of my neck. He turned our positions around and I took the opportunity to slam him into the wall. He shoved right back, face red, panting openly. I stumbled in spite of my best efforts and ended up on the mattress. Kaidoh was jerking the shirt over his head.   
  
"Stop." I caught him at the chest, pressing firmly.  _Not like this,_  I wanted to say, to give him The Facts,  _I don't like it when you're this eager._  
  
What I liked was the grunting and the grousing, the playful wrestling until I always ended up on top of him and asked him if he wanted me until he said "yes". What I loved was the quiet, stoic, almost threatening façade melting to my touch as I reached inside of him in every way I knew how and literally pulled the transitory pleasures from his gut, from his most hidden places.   
  
He grabbed for the water bottle and guzzled half of what was left, letting me keep my hand there on his chest, daring me to move it, daring me to fondle him all the way down to the hard-on I saw tenting his boxers.   
  
I closed my eyes as firmly as I could, hissed "Damn it!" and rolled off of the bed before he could catch me by the waist, which he tried to do. I was, perhaps, as turned off as I had ever been in his presence. He did things that pissed me off, he even did things _to_  piss me off. But he was always somehow untouchable, off limits. Only I could dominate him, kill that unrelenting cold side again and again, make it hotter than he ever hoped or imagined or wanted. And we never really talked about it. It was something which, by any definition, had to be done together, but it was never something we  _shared_. What we shared was a basement apartment with four rooms, what we shared was an illegal and potentially very lucrative business, what we shared was a bed and a bottle of milk and all the food I bought even though I told him to buy his own damned food. We shared nothing intimate, nothing transcendent or beautiful. What we shared were the Facts of our situation. I wasn't about to share an abstract; I wasn't about to share my only other dominion besides the lab.  
  
And in that moment, when I was scrambling inside my head to find a way out of the whole bind without fighting or being fought, an inimitable voice – more of a chime, really – echoed from the doorway. "Hoi hoi!"   
  
Kiki was a walking study in club culture, and a riveting one at that. No surprise to anyone who knew me, but I'd never been interested in the obnoxious kaleidoscope of that scene. I hated forced socialization and I despised strangers' presumptions. Yet, somehow, though he was forehead-deep in it all, I liked Kiki (Kikumaru, formally – but what self-respecting kandy kid would go by that name?) beyond his regular contributions to my financial well-being. He provided something I needed even more, which was an offset to Kaidoh. The truth of  _that_  had never been more apparent than it was as I stumbled into the lab, fixing my eyes on Kiki and forgetting, in an assault of garish colors and wildly distracting fashion choices, about the overzealous roommate in varying shades of black.   
  
I pushed my glasses up and realized they were smudged from the encounter in the bedroom. I didn't take the time to clean them; I was busy, dissecting Kiki's wardrobe as we spoke the cursory introductions. It was like examining a slide of a foreign specimen with rainbow-striped protozoa.   
  
His red hair poked up from beneath his glittery, cat-eared knit cap. He'd even gone so far as to draw whiskers on his cheeks. "Bambi let me in." He informed me, indicating the stairs and the coffee shop above with a jab of his thumb.   
  
Our landlord was actually an old friend who'd made good (and far more honestly than we had) for himself. He was too trusting, too hospitable, for it to end well. But I had never questioned the reasons for the nickname with which Kiki had saddled him. Taka's big, expressive eyes and his guileless face were at once comforting, entrancing, and pitiful. But he knew his way around business, and around other things as well. Things like keeping the police out of  _our_  business. Most of the times we talked, which was often, I'd claim to not want to know how he did it. Nevertheless, I stewed in the possibilities. Bambi (I preferred Taka) was doing something that might have been just as unseemly as our little drug operation, but I couldn't wrap my brain around the suggestion. Not being able to wrap my brain around things bothered me, and so lately I'd been making more of an effort to study Taka more closely.  
  
"Ah. Well. Just in time." I gestured at the table. He drew in a deep breath, adjusting the button-pocked messenger's bag around his Hustler t-shirt – just like the one Brad Pitt had worn in 'Fight Club' – and stepped over to the table. He kept a safe distance, but I saw his eyes sparkling at the prospect. He'd most likely only been up for an hour or two, and was looking to begin his night with a good, long high. I could grant him that wish, and maybe more, if I played the cards right.  
  
Kiki knew new shit when he saw it. He pouted. I detected lip gloss. "I hope this doesn't mean you're jacking up the price."  
  
It hadn't, three seconds ago. But I beat back every muscle that wanted to spasm into an evil smirk as I answered, with an affected drone of apology, "Well…"  
  
"Oh, damnit, Inui!" He whined and squirmed around like a wormy little ferret, like a kitten stretched out on the rack, like a finely-wrought puppet on a million strings. Even his neck snapped around, even his facial muscles exaggerated his displeasure. It wasn't as if Kiki was hurting for money – he may have been the worst sort of club trash, but he was decent to the core, and had managed to catch a ride (quite literally) on a well-to-do, upper-management yuppie who seemed to love him. I wouldn't know what that looked or sounded like, of course, but I took the gospel from Kaidoh's analysis of their relationship.   
  
"Testing it out in the bedroom." I gestured blandly and didn't budge on the topic of price. I hadn't even stamped a dollar amount on it, yet. Dealing may have been Kaidoh's trade, by necessity, but truly negotiating was what I did best. I'd high-ball him, and then offer a solution.   
  
Kiki was presently staring into the bedroom, blinking. Glitter eyeliner, too. What an abhorrently beautiful club twink. I crossed my arms and waited. I didn't know what he was seeing, exactly, but it had to be enough to transfix him. It was strange, to see Kiki in stasis like that. I enjoyed it while it lasted, until he murmured: "How much?"   
  
No, not that. Not yet. "Kaidoh was on me within minutes. He's never on me."   
  
"How much, Inui?" He swayed a little in the doorway, more of a subtle, sinewy dance move than a falter.  
  
"$750 for your usual."   
  
"That's a 50% mark-up, Inui."   
  
"That's going to be the price from now on."  
  
"Give me a sample." Normally I'd laugh at anyone who asked for anything of the sort – normally Kaidoh would walk away. But Kiki was a regular, and he was already in the fire. All I had to do was get him on the spit.  
  
I pretended to wrestle with this idea as I ambled over to the table and plucked up a tablet. "Okay," as I spoke the word he was skittering forward, his high-tops squeaking on my floor, "and I'll make you a deal."   
  
Realizing that I was withholding water from a man dying of thirst (and wearing something that smelled like cotton candy), I felt a rush of power and a surge of sadistic brilliance. Nothing new, really, but it was rare that these strokes of genius ever solved my own problems, much less that they included my favorite customer.   
  
Towards whom, it bears mentioning, I'd always had a certain, voyeuristic attraction.   
  
I didn't feel like beating around any proverbial bushes, though I did struggle with how to word things for a moment or two. It was all so simple, by the time my lips were moving. I pointed my chin at the bedroom door. "Let Kaidoh fuck you. Let me watch. $500."   
  
His expression fell for an instant, and then hardened as he considered it. Guilt,  _that's_  what was all over those fine and tarted-up features. His blue eyes begged me for discretion, pleading softly, as if the walls had ears. "Oishi can't know about this. Not ever."   
  
"I've never met Oishi." I replied flatly.  _And I don't intend to, unless you cross me._  I wanted to add, but didn't.   
  
Kiki probably didn't want me to notice, but his jelly bean tongue touched his cotton candy lips for a second as he glanced at the bedroom. "You promise you won't say a word? And Kaidoh? What about him?"   
  
I leaned closer and held the tablet right in front of his mouth, seducing him in my own sweet way. From afar, with suggestion, pulling out something he didn't know was in him…  
  
"What about Kaidoh? Kaidoh won't even answer people who ask him for the time. And don't tell me you don't want to have that," something flickered, in his eyes, which were still trained away from me. His lips puckered forward, but rolled in on each other just as quickly, "he won't mess around, he won't leave you unsatisfied, and I should mention he's got a  _great_  cock, which happened to be very hard when I last checked."   
  
All this I said with great control, only letting my personal insight shift my tone for a line or two. Secretly, I longed to be him in that moment, with that opportunity. His warm, wiry, bejeweled fingers plucked the tablet from my cold, steady, unremarkable ones. He was letting it melt on his tongue, inches from my face, as we continued. I withheld a smile, but the ghost of one couldn't help but rear itself for anyone looking too closely.  
  
"Damnit, Inui."   
  
"Come on. You get high almost every night and you really just go out  _dancing?_  Tell me you don't just go home and rag out that husband of yours without even considering all the strangers you met."   
  
He didn't tell me. This told me everything. A glare, a beat, and he bounced a little, kept bouncing, and almost grinned despite the pouting. How very playful, how very coquettish. He was a cocktease, plain and simple. Kikumaru Eiji, Cocktease. It could go on a business card. Oishi was considered by many lecherous queens to be the luckiest bastard in the city. "What about you?"   
  
"I told you, I'll watch."   
  
"You're not even tempted?" His fingernails were actually  _painted_ , and he pressed one to my chest. He was going for my arms when I grabbed him by the wrists. He was fragile, but I knew him to have a hidden strength that allowed him to fight off all those lechers, night after night. Kiki wouldn't fight me, though.   
  
"Get in there, he's in pain by now." I did smirk now, because the concept was almost funny. Kiki swung his arms around his lithe little body like cords as he made for the dark room.   
  
I didn't follow him immediately. I turned my back to the door and removed my glasses to clean them. For the first time since I'd seen Kaidoh rolling around on the bed like an oversexed co-ed, I was feeling a little horny. I tried to determine how much of this was self-satisfaction that my plan had worked, that I'd even gotten the idea in the first place. But I chalked it up to good timing and quick thinking, after a brief interlude of personal thought, and approached the door just in time to hear Kiki whispering rather noisily:   
  
"Hey, baby," he sounded like a porn star, and a female one at that, speaking in not her native tongue. Over-enunciated, breathy, voracious. Oh, he knew I was watching, "hey, whatcha doin'?"   
  
The cat-eared cap was first to go, pulled off by Kiki as he slinked forward on his hands and knees, falling over Kaidoh, stretching all over him, their limbs contorting in what only looked to be interesting ways as they morphed into an embrace and began to kiss and laugh. Kiki did most of the laughing, and a lot of gasping. Kaidoh was under his shirt and inside his pants within minutes, and they didn't appear to be wasting time. Now I saw the Kaidoh I knew – silent, strong, distant. But his hands were so insistent and possessive on that skinny little body, dotted here and there with metal and ink everywhere new flesh was uncovered. I knew I couldn't have been held that way, but this was the next best thing. This was perhaps even better. I'd never actually gotten to see Kaidoh like this, to absorb all the details of the man and his sexual M.O. Kiki was just a (certainly not technical) cherry on top.  
  
The cooing and giggling and whispering and touching and kissing and biting continued with the disrobing. By the time only his knee-socks and high-tops were left, Kiki was kissing Kaidoh's stomach, teasing his cock, asking little things I couldn't quite hear. Kaidoh muttered something back, and Kiki grinned and rubbed his pouted lips just below the navel. His perfect little ass was boldly curvaceous despite the deceptive lack of meat on his bones, and I reminded myself for not the last time that my place was at the door, watching.   
  
Kiki's next question I heard quite well, as I watched Kaidoh's cock twitch desperately toward the dalliance of his mouth. "How about him," he made an obvious but gentle nod toward me, knowing that, like any self-respecting voyeur, I wasn't really supposed to be there, "is he good at this?"   
  
Kaidoh gazed at me blearily. "He doesn't do it."   
  
It stung only because someone else was there. But it was just another Fact. I loved his cock, but I wasn't going to lower myself to that, not as long as his ass was mine. As a pleasant surprise, this made Kiki break out into a grin, and announce quite proudly: "Then allow me." I didn't take it as a slight, but rather as an invitation to the show.   
  
My eyes focused on Kaidoh's abdomen, on the steady rolling of muscle and flesh as he breathed steadily, with crucial moments tightening everything, head to toe, before the hypnotic sight began again. His back arched, after a few minutes, and he began to tremble slightly when his breath fell shorter. Kiki was working slowly, mercilessly. It was obvious that he loved doing this.   
  
"That's enough," our friend spoke at last, pulling up and grabbing Kaidoh's shoulders, doing that same yoga-cat-stretch thing. This time it was so much more interesting to watch. He had it down to a science, pulling up just enough to kiss Kaidoh's collarbone, rolling his hips down with feline grace to brush their cocks together. I had to consider whether he was always like this, or whether a gracious discount was worth such a performance. Whether Kaidoh was worth it. Either possibility fit. Or maybe he was just always like this.   
  
Kiki was in his face, a hairsbreadth away from his mouth. "You wanna fuck me now?"  
  
"Mmm."   
  
"You want it?"   
  
"Yeah."  
  
There was a moment in which I expected Kiki to straddle him from that position and continue the gratuitous porn star posturing, but that was giving Kaidoh too little credit. Within moments the scene turned from decadent foreplay to chaotic urgency. A little yelp escaped Kiki as Kaidoh tossed him onto his back, and a sharp moan followed as those supple legs with the obscenely fetishistic footwear were jerked up at the knees, pulled around Kaidoh's waist, and locked there. There was a blind, frantic search for the bottle of Astroglide thrown in with all the clutter around the mattress, and during those moments I took the few steps back and into the kitchen. I had to sidestep the door to the refrigerator as it opened, lest I run into the oven. The kitchen was criminally small, but I suppose that was just as well for a couple of criminals.   
  
I opened the refrigerator and retrieved a half-liter of water to toss into the room, supposing it would be needed soon enough. I almost grabbed two. When too much water is consumed in too little time, it soaks up all the sodium in the blood. When it has nowhere else to go, it heads for the brain. Despite what horror films try to tell us, there are actually very few ways to kill someone by making his or her brain explode. It would be so exciting, so blameless, so easy. My fingers slid over two bottle caps and lingered, but in the end I decided it was best to keep Kiki around.  
  
My reemergence proved to be perfectly timed. Kaidoh seemed neither considerate nor careful about the way he entered Kiki, and Kiki seemed not to mind. He gave one of those strange, high-pitched, grimacing noises, and was panting out loud, little moans hiccupping out in time to the movement of their bodies. I was comfortably hard but didn't dare do anything about it at that moment. I tilted my head a little to get a better sidelong view. I could size Kiki up just from the way he sounded – no wonder he had a faithful husband, the little scamp got off on penetration.   
  
As usual, I heard very little from Kaidoh beyond his breathing. It was hard to hear anything else above the noises the mattress made and the continued, frantic mewling from Kiki. He reached up and grabbed Kaidoh's hair – I wished I'd put a few disclaimers on the liberties he was able to take, at that moment, but showing any jealousy on my part would definitely have been showing too much. Besides, the jealous rush made me harder, and I will neither confirm nor deny that a murmur of consideration thrummed in my throat. The heels of those sneakers dug into Kaidoh's lower back as Kiki came, falling suddenly silent, arching his little body in ways too unnatural not to be exciting.   
  
Nothing remarkable about what followed, really; Kaidoh had an unspectacular orgasm, they rolled away from each other as if they were suddenly strangers, and the next thing that struck me as brutally poignant was the look of guilt on Kiki's red face. He snatched the bottle of water from my hand and glared at me.   
  
"Not going to relieve yourself?" He asked, smiling once more, running two fingers up the front of my thigh before I caught him, again, by the wrist.   
  
"Not just yet. Get what you need." I watched him carefully to make sure he wasn't going to screw us, not that I expected he would. He didn't blame me for his infidelity, and he certainly didn't blame Kaidoh. He probably blamed the pills, to be frank, and it was just as well that he should have. I wanted to observe him more, to see just how he managed, night after night, to avoid temptation. I figured temptation didn't always come with a price tag.   
  
His money was usually neat and tidy, and tonight was no exception. I followed him upstairs once I had the $500 in my hand. He turned around, one curl of his hair sticking up strangely from the bedroom frolic, to ask me what I was doing.   
  
I waved the bills in the air and they made the usual sound with which I hated to part. "Someone has to pay the rent."   
  
"Geez," he grumbled as we stepped up into the back storage room of the Café de Ville (you couldn't accuse Taka's family of being original. You also couldn't accuse them of being French), "you should've just let me give the money to Bambi."   
  
He was almost finished with the half-liter of water already. "Oh, he's not getting all of it." Together we walked through the door and into the kitchen area, where the smell of coffee mingled with the smell of fresh baked goods, with cinnamon rising to the olfactory top of it all. Kiki pulled on his cat-eared cap and bade me farewell, bouncing off into the night to dance his guilt and troubles away. I avoided detection from the three-person front counter staff, my landlord amongst them, and ducked into the employee bathroom. I didn't need much time to rub this one out, but I needed the security of a locking door. What was I even thinking of? This was just an instinctive reaction, and I'd certainly been provided with more than enough stimuli. Kaidoh on his knees, panting. Kaidoh grabbing me. No. Me shoving Kaidoh into the wall. Better. Kiki's knee socks and the moon tattoo on his left thigh. Kaidoh had bent him so far, his knees were practically at his shoulders. How would he have treated me, if I'd let him have his way?   
  
The possibilities made me come faster than they should have. This did not bode well. Especially considering what a good orgasm it had been. I managed to shrug off the thought and make myself believe that it was just too much stimuli, and just before I turned on the water to wash my hands there came a knock at the bathroom door.   
  
"Occupé." I muttered over my shoulder, loud enough to be heard.   
  
"Inui?"   
  
"Yeah. I have the rent."   
  
"But—"   
  
"Kaidoh's taking a shower. Had to come up here."   
  
Taka was smart enough to know the water wasn't running in the basement at that moment. But a bold-faced lie was sometimes as good as telling someone to let it go. I toweled my hands off hastily and opened the door, fanning out $400 for his appraisal.   
  
He was one of the few people in my everyday life who was just as tall as me, so it was a relief to look someone in the eye without trying too hard. "Good timing. I was just about to close up for the night and head home."   
  
"No you weren't."   
  
"Eh?" He made a face usually reserved for puppies and dolls as I pushed the stack of bills into his breast pocket.  
  
He was about to protest. But I was a champion interrupter. "Close up if you want. But I'm going to get something to drink. I'd rather have it up here. Besides," I rounded the corner and glanced out at the café, "you still have a customer."   
  
"Yeah. He comes here every night right around closing. Never says much. Seems like a good kid, though. Always orders something different. Never makes a fuss when we have to close. He's like a pet." Taka laughed feebly. I kept my eyes on the intriguingly young-looking patron scowling into his coffee mug. The Café du Ville closed at 2 a.m., every night.   
  
"He's a whore."   
  
"Inui!" Taka looked flabbergasted that I had dared to say such a thing, and nearly lost his control on the cappuccino machine. I rolled my eyes a little bit. I hadn't really wanted a cappuccino, but it was all that was left that hadn't been put into storage for the night.   
  
"Well, it stands to reason. Every night, Taka? He can't be older than fourteen. Look at him. He probably heads off to work after this. I wonder if he even has parents. Don't look at me like that. He can't hear me." Not over the machinery, at least. Finally, when all the frothing was done and it finally looked as if Taka would be able to keep his eyes inside their sockets, we took up one of the long couches near the back of the café. We exchanged the pleasantries and the not-so-pleasantries about day-to-day life. I learned that he was working two jobs now and only came into the café from 10:00 pm until closing, but he would offer no further information (which, of course, piqued my curiosity).   
  
"Are  _you_  a whore?" I teased, which is not something beyond the realm of possibility.   
  
 _"Inui!"_  
  
"What? He can't hear me, Christ. Get a hold of yourself."   
  
"You know very well that I'm not."   
  
"Hn."   
  
The back door closed – the other employees were leaving for the night. I'd been only subconsciously aware of their presence, anyway. A lot of people made it a point to avoid me.  
  
"You're trying to get me to tell you about my other job, and I won't. It's not a matter of embarrassment, it's just a matter of…security." He half-shrugged, and scratched behind his neck in that uncomfortably adorable way I knew very well.   
  
"Ah," the boy was getting up, but wasn't taking his things (a backpack and a drawstring bag). He was shorter than I'd even gathered from his sitting position, but not without his charm. I held my cup steady and watched him turn the sign and flip the switch on the outside lights. My eyebrows began to creep up my forehead in spite of themselves, "does this have anything to do with why the cops don't bother us, Taka?"  
  
"Maybe…"   
  
"Hey," the boy's voice was unexpectedly deep. Maybe he was closer to fourteen. He was still standing at the door, facing us. "It's ten minutes past closing."  
  
"Oh, is it?" Taka looked flustered for a few moments, but after checking the clock he laughed it off, "it's all right, it's all right, we don't get many people this late. You can stay if you're still finishing up."   
  
"I'm almost done." He answered simply, no waver whatsoever in his voice. My eyes followed him as if they were being pulled by his movements. My face showed no indication of this, lest my interest seem anything but genuinely curious. He remained standing to finish his coffee, and Taka was explaining something about Kiki and how he seemed like such a nice guy, he couldn't believe he'd have anything to do with my business.   
  
"You'd be surprised." I murmured at the rim of my cappuccino glass, not actually sipping it.   
  
"That's very true." There was a conviction in his smiling answer that made my brain do another double-take. I'd have to come up for coffee with Taka more often, now. I was dying to wear him down until I found out what was going on.   
  
"Can you lock the door behind me?" The boy was in front of us, one hand in his pockets and the other holding that drawstring bag. It was a regular shopping bag from the one of the more upscale organic supermarkets downtown. He probably didn't have parents. At least not any that deserved to be called such.   
  
"Oh, oh, yes!" Taka nodded and smiled and leapt to his feet, rushing ahead to hold the door open for this strange little nightwalker. An air of something circulated around him, and I couldn't quite place it as stoicism, confidence, misanthropy, or none of the above. It was something, and it was powerful. He looked at me – a long, surveying stare, and I noticed that he had a pair of the most exotic hazel eyes I'd ever seen. I may have detected eyeliner, but the lights in the café were too dim. I raised my glass at him. He clutched the brim of his baseball cap and turned away, ducking too far into the collar of his jacket for me to see if the expression he adopted was a smirk or a sneer. I'd just been snubbed by a teenager, but then, I probably deserved it. And I certainly didn't mind in this particular case.   
  
"Goodnight, Ryoma!" Taka ushered him out politely. So the boy had a name now. It sounded so familiar. I cross-referenced it with every acquaintance, business or otherwise, that either Kaidoh or myself knew, and came up dry.   
  
"See ya." He answered simply, not looking back, throwing up one hand in a dismissive wave.   
  
The door clicked shut behind him, the lock clunking into place. Taka was talking but I really wasn't listening. Ryoma. It was so familiar. I'd ask Kaidoh when I went back down. I'd ask Kiki if that didn't pan out. Where was he going, what was he doing, and why did it interest me so much?   
  
I didn't give a damn about strangers. I tried to convince myself of this as I slipped back into a conversation with Taka, but it just wasn't settling in as a Fact.


	2. Momo

It began, I think, when I was working night shift as a computer tech at the community college. Sweet gig, that one – go around and help clueless teachers and attractive co-eds figure out where their 'Start' button is or how to send a document to the shared printer. It paid well and I managed a pretty steady social life, but it was dead-end and I knew it. Anyway. That has no bearing. What I'm trying to explain is how I came to be living with an underage male prostitute.  
  
We carried those cell phones with the walkie-talkies – you know, the big, tank-like things that they claim you can drop from a thirty-story building and they'll still work all right? I liked to hold mine, to actually carry a phone that made me feel somehow official and important. My hands are naturally big, and The Brick (we called them our Bricks) was a pretty nice fit. I got to twirling it, one night, I guess, and I didn't even notice. Now, I'd played basketball in high school, so the dynamics were basically the same. But by the time I was doing this with other things – desktop widgets, paperweights, staplers – it was hard to not be known as "The Guy Who Twirls Things". I'd throw 'em around, too – left hand to right, spinning up and down, tossing…  
  
A girl who didn't know what it meant to 'right-click' on something told me one night that I should be a bartender. I suppose that's a step up from 'Baton Girl', which was a career path suggested by some of my more sarcastic coworkers. I'd never even though of bartending. There was so much to memorize, it seemed more like a sport combined with an art form than a job. Like gymnastics or figure skating, but far less fruity to the general public. As there were no national bartending championships on ESPN2, I just rented 'Cocktail' and (don't laugh) 'Coyote Ugly', and started practicing with a chart I printed out online. I was a fast learner – always had been. More physically than mentally, though I'd made passable grades in high school. Enough to get me into college and enough to earn myself a worthless degree in Liberal Arts. Mom wanted me to be a teacher – probably still does. She tried not to bring it up once I got the tech job and instead shifted to the subject of when I was going to get married (to which my response was always "I'm only 23!"). Dad didn't really care what I did, as long as I didn't do anything illegal, and so I took that to heart. That job was the first one I had that lasted more than six months since I graduated. This fact didn't upset me in the least. However, dad couldn't avoid remarking, jokingly, how it was pretty telling that I'd had to go back to college, even indirectly, to keep a steady job.   
  
I was on the brink of being salaried, which would have meant endless hours and keeping The Brick on my hip at all times lest something happen to the network overnight, when I put in my two weeks' notice and followed An's advice (she was the 'right-click' girl, please try to keep up). I showed up at a bustling little place not far from my apartment that boasted "the best bar in town". Oh, I sucked at first. I failed miserably at my "try-out" when I was pressed to admit that I had no professional experience. They stuck me with waiting tables. But I formed a fast friendship with a few of the guys (I do that) behind the bar, one of whom took me under his wing after hours. I think, without Yuuta, I might have just kept waiting tables. I didn't want to leave the Jack Knife (oh, that's the name of the place. Sorry for not mentioning that before), because it was friendly and upbeat and the owner actually  _owned_  the building, so there wasn't any fear of sudden foreclosure on the place if we had less than three customers a night, which we sometimes did. But the customers were loyal, and by the time the floor manager was letting me moonlight behind the bar with Yuuta, I was learning their names and bringing home a much more considerable share of tips. They hired a new waiter, and said they'd give me a probationary period as a bartender.  
  
Flash and confidence are two things I have which can be construed as either strengths or weaknesses, depending. So I broke a few bottles and glasses. No big deal. I always had enough money to pay to replace them, and it was mostly during lunch hours. More important than my occasional falters, I made good drinks. The sleight of hand mixed with ballet that was being a bartender at the Jack Knife was secondary, and I was doing pretty well (I  _had_  watched Cocktail about twenty times, and was still practicing at home), but nothing felt quite so good as making one of the patrons a "perfect martini". He and his colleagues started ordering it as a 'Momotini', and it was about that time that they cut my probationary period short and started bringing me in from dinner rush to close.   
  
I finally had enough money to move into the brownstone I'd been eyeing on S.W. 24th, but two bedrooms seemed like a waste considering that I had few material possessions to my name. A pet would have been too much responsibility given my work schedule (not that I didn’t want one). I asked Yuuta what he thought about moving in together, and he dodged the question oddly, saying something about already having a place. We were working, anyway, so I didn’t hear the entire answer, just the oh-I-don't-know noise before he started talking and I thought of my other options.   
  
Everyone else I knew had their living arrangements set. I wasn't in college anymore. I moved into the brownstone anyway and then put an ad in the paper. I figured, I was making more than enough to keep myself satisfied, so I could feel free to be picky about who would relieve the loneliness around the place.   
  
And this, after my long-winded life story, is how I met Ryoma.   
  
He was new to the city, and he looked younger than he was. I constantly had to tell my friends this when they came over for Halo parties or picked me up for not-quite-band practice (we didn't have a bassist. And none of us were looking for one. As far as we were concerned, a bassist would drop from the sky when the fates dictated). None of my defenses shielded me from the accusations of being a shameless lech, regardless of the fact that Ryoma voluntarily disappeared upstairs whenever company came over, and appeared, from an outsider's perspective, to quite loathe me. Our neighbors really liked him, and I told them he was my little brother, which was easy to believe if you squinted or, like our neighbors, were old and had bad eyesight. He took care of the cat next door whenever old Ms. D'Aoust went off to visit her girlfriends in…wherever…so I knew she'd never rat me out for keeping an un-declared roommate. All things considered, the landlord probably wouldn't mind if it weren't for that niggling little detail of Ryoma being underage.   
  
So maybe I'd broken the promise to my dad, but it wasn't like I had any ulterior motives. Ryoma may have been eight years younger than me, but I had absolutely no attraction that was on a conscious level, and we got along exceedingly well despite that outward appearance of indifference toward all things living on his part. When I was planning a party for his 16th birthday and he protested vehemently, I asked him, didn't he want to have any friends over? He didn't have any friends, he said, just people he knew from work.  
  
Around that time, I finally learned what Ryoma did for a living, and I can't say I was fazed beyond a lightning flash of protectiveness. Why wasn't I fazed, you might ask? Well, let's go back to the Jack Knife for a bit.   
  
"Yuuta?" I asked one night, wiping out glasses, re-arranging the bar carefully before we closed up.  
  
"Hm?" He was always so good-natured, but far kinder than someone like me. Less flash, less confidence. But he was damned good at his job. I normally didn't take hurting another man's feelings into consideration, but with Yuuta I sort of had to.   
  
"Is that your new car in the parking lot?"   
  
"Ah!" He grinned and played around with his short hair, momentarily forgetting where the Citron went. "Yeah! You noticed? I put the down payment on it yesterday!"   
  
"That's a  _Mercedes_."  
  
"Mmm-hmm!" He was back to the bottles quicker than I had expected, denoting another one of those patented Yuuta let-me-avoid-the-subject moments.   
  
"Hey, hey, hey. You're renting an apartment on Bridge Street, you just got a $40,000 car,  _and_  you're going to school?"   
  
"Only part-time—"   
  
"That's not the point. You know what I mean. What, are your parents rich?"   
  
He finally looked at me, and shrugged a little bit, wanting to lie but knowing he was caught. "Not…not really."   
  
"Shacking up with a rich older woman, then?"   
  
This made him laugh out loud, though a blush of humiliation crossed his features. "No, nothing…" a thoughtful pause that was almost imperceptible, "nothing  _really_  like that."  
  
"Okay, you've got me stumped. I know you don't have a second job, we were talking about filing our taxes just the other day and—"   
  
"Well…" I stopped and watched him as he whined to correct me. His features twitched a little bit, "that's not entirely true."   
  
I always assume the best in everyone. This is also something that can be considered a strength or a weakness, depending. "Okay, so you have an under-the-table gig. Come on, I'm not going to  _judge_  you or anything."   
  
The glare he gave me was unlike anything I'd ever seen – a side of Yuuta I didn't know existed, really. It was short-lived, though, and then he sighed. He looked around the bar area, across the dining room, and made sure we were alone. His voice dropped to a whisper as he came closer. "It's not exactly legal."   
  
"Under-the-table gigs usually aren't."  
  
"I don't mean just to the IRS."   
  
I let this sink in and matched it with the glare he'd given me. I was still determined not to judge him, and to assume the best. Yuuta didn't seem like the sort of guy to be caught up in anything too scary. He hadn't even watched 'Saw' yet because he didn't like horror movies. "….okay?"  
  
With a shift of his weight and a glance down, he sighed through his nose. "I sort of…do stuff…sexual stuff…for money."   
  
Wow, he really wanted to avoid the word as tactfully as possible, didn't he?   
  
I felt the same flash of protectiveness I would later feel for Ryoma. I was only two years older than Yuuta, but like my roommate, he seemed younger than his age somehow. And he was certainly one of those people who silently and, perhaps, unwittingly, begged to be protected.   
  
"I wasn't expecting to hear that."   
  
"Yeah." He kept his eyes down.   
  
"That's cool," I shrugged and said brightly, kneeling down and wiping the cabinets as if nothing had really happened, "one of the guys I play music with used to be into this gang stuff, but he had the personality for it.  _That_  was scary. You just…didn't strike me as the type for what you do. Which is better, I guess. Probably means you're really careful and everything, which is all I ask."   
  
"Ask?"   
  
"As your friend." I stopped talking to the cabinet and looked up at him, smiling softly. He took a few seconds to register this, and then lit up with a grin of his own, nodding.   
  
"Yeah! I am…and it's not so bad. My…my employer," he really hated every word associated with the profession, didn't he? "is really good at choosing my clients. It's more like an escort service, what I do."   
  
"Women or men?" It was a question of genuine interest, and to tell the truth, I'd been curious about Yuuta on this level for some time.   
  
"Both," he nodded, almost proudly, "I'm pretty good. Hey, do you want me to…you know…give Tezuka your number? Maybe you'd like to get in on it…"   
  
"Me? No!" My reaction may have been a bit akin to what I would have done had someone asked if I wanted to be branded with a hot iron, but I tried to soothe any insult Yuuta may have taken from it, "…that's not for me, at all. Despite everything you might think about me, I'm pretty awkward in those situations. I mean, I'm not  _incapable_ , but I can't see…with strangers…" I trailed off and then found myself again, "I'm just a die-hard romantic, I guess."   
  
"Well, most people develop a pretty regular client base, so it's not really strangers after the first couple of weeks. Still…I understand. Now," he clinked the last bottle into its place and ran his hands under the hot running water, "now that you know this about me, promise not to tell?"   
  
"Hey, scout's honor!" I actually held up my fingers, and he made an incredulous, laughing face, "yes, I really was a boy scout."   
  
We laughed together, and Yuuta let out a protracted sigh of relief, leaning back against the bar. "You're the first person I've told."   
  
"I'm glad you did. But if anyone else asks and you want to lie, just tell them you have an online business or something like that. Or give the rich older woman story – that breeds a mystique, too." Another laugh together, and I clapped him on the shoulder as I walked past, "on your way out?"   
  
"Yup!" He looked happier than I'd seen him in some time.   
  
"Say…do you have rich parents? You were driving a pretty nice car before the Mercedes, too."  
  
His face fell again, and he shrugged. The scowl was gone, then, and he offered me a half-hearted laugh. "I don't like to talk about my family. Besides, even if it's true, do you think I'd be working like I do if I wanted anything to do with them?"  
  
I just nodded, knowing when to drop a subject. I wanted to see Yuuta stay happy. Actually, knowing what I knew now, it was an imperative. Despite the demeanor I projected, I could have easily been voted Most Likely To Take a Knife to the Throat of Anyone Who Fucked With His Friends.   
  
Which brings us back (rather nicely, I must say) to Ryoma. Our domestic life was all you'd expect – I worked odd hours, he worked even odder hours, we slept during the day, we ordered a lot of pizza and picked up a lot of take-out. I had friends over, he didn't. But I kept my social circle small, and I kept it relatively sane. Everyone liked to think I was far more popular than I really was, and so I let them. But, occasionally, Ryoma and I would cross paths, and then it was time for the big brother complex to kick in.   
  
It was only 4:00 am when he pushed the door open and announced his presence with a groaning "Hey" as he toed off his shoes in the entryway. I was sprawled on the couch with Dynasty Warriors 2, which remained my favorite in the series. I lost interest in the game as I checked the clock.  
  
"You're home early."  
  
"Mn," he removed the baseball cap he wore to remain as inconspicuous as possible on the streets, and shook his fingers through his unruly hair, "not a good night." He was on his way to the fridge for a grape soda. I'd done some grocery shopping yesterday and we were fully stocked.   
  
"Bad, or just disappointing?" There was an acute difference.  
  
"Strange." He responded with a weird, detached tone. Now, weird, detached tones were nothing new from Ryoma, but usually they were indicative of his interest in anything but the topic at hand. This time, he sounded thoughtful, meditative.   
  
I slid the controller aside and stood up, narrowing my eyes. "Is everything all right?"   
  
He shook his head quickly, as if bringing himself back into the real world. "Yeah. Yeah…I just suppose I didn't get enough sleep today."   
  
"Well, I've got some Tylenol PM if you wanna be sure to get your full 14 hours in now." I joked, moving to the "dining room" (really just a roomy partition between the kitchen and the living room) table, pulling a chair out, and straddling it. "Why don't you sit down? Get off your feet for a little while. Did a client drop you off tonight?"   
  
Usually they did. From what I understood, from what he told me and what Yuuta could confirm, Ryoma had built quite the affluent client base since his arrival. Tezuka showed him a certain preferential treatment, but that was to be expected. He was highly illegal, highly attractive, and thus highly desirable. But Ryoma shook his head, this time not breaking from any trance, but rather solemnly admitting that he'd walked home.   
  
"That's not right, Ryoma," I said firmly, a little bit shocked, "you could have called me. You know you can always call me and I'll—"   
  
He cut me off softly, staring at the soda can he was clutching with both hands. "Momoshiro…" it was a rare moment that he used my full name, and it certainly succeeded in interrupting me, "I don't really remember what happened tonight, okay? Something weird. But I'm okay."   
  
I was hesitant to reply, and understandably so. Typical Ryoma – he seemed so collected, so unfettered. And me, I was dying to know what could have caused this tone of voice. "What do you remember?" I asked at last, after a long period of silence. He hadn't even taken one sip of his soda.   
  
Those eyes of his were so many things at once, but right now they were a mess of contradictions. Focused but unfocused, sharp but wavering, pinning me to my seat but careless of whether I obeyed. "I went to his house, just like always. And then…I came here, and you were talking to me."   
  
"Whose house?"   
  
"Dr. Sakaki," his eyes were moving around now, like he was waking up finally, remembering things, "the music professor, you remember."   
  
"Yeah," I didn't like him, and I'd never met him. Ryoma had never gone out of his way to speak fondly of him, "did he…did he drug you or something, because you  _really_  seem out of it."   
  
"No," Ryoma was quick to debunk that theory, "I don't even think we did anything, to be honest. But I do remember that when I showed up, he…he was on the phone…"   
  
"Mm-hmm?" Any details were important ones, now.   
  
Ryoma sighed deeply, petulantly. He tilted his head down and ran his fingers over his face. He wasn't used to talking this much. "I don't know. Something about a meeting. It just struck me as really weird. Momo, have you ever heard of something called The Empire?"   
  
Now here was a quandary. Not whether or not I knew, but whether or not to tell him.   
  
"I never want you going back to Dr. Sakaki again."   
  
"Don't worry about that. I won't be." I didn't have time, until I reflected upon our conversation, to note how momentously final those words sounded.  
  
"Good. He might be involved in The Empire. In fact, damnit, you should call the police on him. No, that wouldn't do much good…not for us…"  
  
"Momo," I wondered, daily, sometimes hourly, how such a kid could be so forceful. I supposed it had something to do with his profession. Other times, I just chalked it up to his natural propensity for blunt honesty, "what is it? The Empire? Just tell me, or I'm going to bed."   
  
Would any of you mind, terribly, if we went back to the Jack Knife, just for a few minutes? I promise this won't take long.   
  
"Yuuta!" I'd been worried sick. He hadn't shown up for work on a Saturday night, he wasn't answering his cell phone, and no one had heard from him. When he moved in beside me at the bar he was out of breath, obviously out of sorts, and red around the eyes. But he forced a pleasant expression and greeted a customer immediately. Between dutiful movements from liquor bottles to taps to glasses, and more cheerful interactions with the impatient crowd, he got in a few words to me.   
  
"I'm fine."   
  
"But you—"  
  
"Oh, it's…it's just something I'll—" he caught a glass that I dropped before it hit the floor. My first fumble in months, "—just don't think about it. I'll explain later. We're busy."   
  
It took a lot to keep my hands from shaking and my mind from wandering, but that night is when I learned how to do it. To force the big brother tendencies into the background and focus, focus, focus. I had to keep busy, or else I'd worry about Ryoma, or Yuuta, or both. So I kept busy, and I lost myself in it, and I ended up having a better (and more lucrative) night than I'd had in some time.   
  
But even the fat wad of tips I needed to smooth out and count wasn't enough to keep me focused once we were alone again, in the otherwise empty front house, uneasily wiping down the bar.   
  
"I'm sorry for worrying you, it's just that—"   
  
"You don't need to apologize for anything!" I snapped a little bit, but drew myself back from the outburst quickly, "just…please, explain what happened. I'll be quiet. Just tell me."  
  
"My brother." He walked to the sink and wrung out his towel, gripping the thing with an unusual amount of force, twisting it violently. His hands shook a little by the time he'd reached his limit. "My brother invited me over to his house. He never does that, and I can't say I ever want to go, either. I don't even know what I think of him anymore. I used to say I loved him even with all he'd done to me – he made my life a living Hell, to be frank. Always more popular, smarter, better at  _everything_ …" he opened the dishwasher and started to wipe out the glasses, just to keep himself on the other side of the bar, facing away, "I went to another high school, just to keep clear of him. But lately he's been calling me, and mailing me, saying all these cryptic things about how he needs to talk to me and he wants to patch things up. I couldn't keep ignoring him forever, so finally I just went over to his house for dinner. What he said…oh God…"   
  
He wasn't breaking down, wasn't falling into a weepy mess, none of that. But he was breathing a little too fast, and from what I could see he'd screwed up his face tightly, holding one wrist to his forehead. "Go on…"  
  
"I can't…"  
  
"You've got to tell  _someone_." This time I was beyond watching myself when I snapped. It seemed to do the trick. He nodded swiftly and picked up his next glass.  
  
"You're right. Shuusuke told me to stop what I was doing, to stop working for Tezuka. He told me I was in trouble, that anyone in that profession was in trouble…in this town…and he'd been trying to get me to quit from the first day, which was around when the calls and letters started. Funny," a sad laugh, "I never made that connection. It was bad enough that my brother even knew, but there he was in his fucking  _mansion_ , telling me to stop doing the only thing I'd ever been good at… _really_  good at…"   
  
I let him catch his breath before he went on. He wasn't going to stop, now. Yuuta sounded angry, confused, and to that end it was the first time I'd ever heard him swear. No wonder he didn't like to talk about his family.  
  
"So I asked him 'why?' Why was I in danger? Why stop now? Of course it's a risky profession, it's  _always_  been a risky profession, but why was  _he_  suddenly so interested?" The next glass, he slammed back onto the shelf, and I almost reached out to stop him from what he was doing. But I noticed his fingers move gently over it, as if apologizing for what he'd just done. "Sorry…" Was he talking to me, or the glass? "He wouldn't answer. He just kept saying that I needed to take his advice, for once in my life, that he wanted to protect me and that I'd only be in more trouble if I knew the reasons. And Momo, you just can't imagine it. You don't know what it's like to listen to him. He always sounds so calm, so pleasant, but he's not. He's just not."  
  
My lips formed his name, but I didn't actually say anything out loud.   
  
"Anyway," like he was putting a sour cap on his brotherly rant, "he stood up, and he walked over to me, and it scared me to death, because there's this  _look_  he gets, and I know that look. He's had it since we were kids, and it always meant he was going to be really mean. Now…now I don't know what it means, but it's even worse. He trapped me in my chair…held both of the armrests, you know? And leaned in on me. 'Okay,' he said, ' you want to know so badly? The Empire isn't just targeting homeless kids and junkies and streetwalkers anymore, they're going for the  _honest_  whores now.' I barely got the words out…I barely asked, 'What's The Empire?' before he was answering me. 'You just watch, if you don't want to get out now. Just watch and see how many of your coworkers wind up dead, if you're not one of the first.'"   
  
At that point, I couldn't have interrupted even if I wanted to.  
  
"It was an adrenaline flash, I know it, but I managed to shove him away and scramble for the antechamber. There's a locking system on his doors, though…I couldn't get out. Why would he have something like that, I wondered? Why would Shuusuke know about this…this Empire thing? And why would he know people were going to die? When it all came crashing in on me, I sort of lost it. I threw up. I cried. He let me, without lifting a finger. I curled myself up into a ball so tight, I wanted nothing more than to be out of there, to be back here or back home, or  _somewhere_. I was suddenly paranoid of everyone, everything. I mean, what sort of thing was that to know, suddenly? My brother was a murderer? Some sort of…super murderer, maybe?"  
  
The floor manager popped his head out of the dining room, but I waved at him swiftly, and he just nodded, flashing us two fingers in a 'bye, I'll be going now, you guys lock up' gesture.   
  
"When he finally moved to touch me, I threw his arm off and was all, 'What's The Empire?' I wasn't going to let him touch me again, not ever. But he wasn't going to say another word until it was an answer. I asked him again, and again, and I was getting hoarse because I'd just thrown up…God, Momo…" I remembered what he'd looked like when he'd come to work, and how quickly he'd snapped into a happy-go-lucky manner. It was unbelievable. I couldn't have done that. He should have been an actor, "he yelled at me, finally. 'I'm part of it!' he yelled, towering over me, arms crossed, and I thought for a brief, terrifying moment that he was going to just kill me, too. 'I'm part of it, and so are a lot of people who do business with Tezuka – with you and your friends!' It's…The Empire…it's all murderers. Good ones, he explained. They challenge each other, they protect each other, they compete and even work together, sometimes. I couldn't…I couldn't really make heads or tails of it, until I thought about it, way too long, huddled there. And then it started to make perfect sense."   
  
"Yuuta…you need to report this."   
  
"And then say what? Tell them about what I do for a living?"   
  
"Report it anonymously."   
  
"No," he turned to me at last. This was the glare I'd seen, the first time I'd ever said I wasn't going to judge him, "he's my brother, Momo."   
  
"But you said yourself that—"  
  
"I know. I'm a hypocrite. I know that. But he tried to protect me, regardless. I can't do it, he's…he's my brother."   
  
That night, I took him to my place and let him sleep in my bed. He just needed someone there, he said, someone he could trust. Ryoma just thought I'd gone to sleep early. He never knew Yuuta was even there, or that I was holding him while he slept. Me? I couldn't even close my eyes.   
  
All that had happened a week ago. Behind the bar, we hadn’t spoken of it. But, if my own mind was any indication, I don't think either of us could stop thinking about it.  
  
Okay, so that took a lot longer than I thought. Brevity isn't one of my strong suits.  
  
I told Ryoma everything I knew, trying to trim off the fat of my conversation with Yuuta, of the specifics. He nodded occasionally, throughout, with his fingers still laced around that soda can. I don't really know if I just  _wanted_  to see it, but I detected a bit of lucidity coming back to him as I went on.   
  
"Well, that makes sense, then." He seemed hardly affected by the fact that he'd been in the service of a killer for several weeks, now. Typical.   
  
I sighed, weary of his grating monotone. "What does?"   
  
"Why he tried to kill me."   
  
"Wait. Wait. Hold on." I slammed a palm on the table and stood up, pacing, pinching the bridge of my nose. "What. The  _fuck!?_ "  
  
"Don't worry. I think I remember now. What happened." He lifted his soda at last, and took a sip. When he lowered it, he was staring ahead, but had that little smile that always managed to freak me the Hell out.   
  
"Ryoma. You can't keep--"   
  
He looked up at me, and his eyes were completely focused, sharp, and pinning me in place. "I think I killed him." 


	3. Atobe

_"He had a beautiful neck". If there ever comes a time that I'm careless enough to make a mistake (which there will not), or if I am ever smote by some ungrateful former compatriot (which is far more likely a scenario), I can imagine facing any executioner with those words at my disposal.  
  
That's it, my future, my fate if it spirals so. And I will not regret a moment. "Any last words?" "Yes. He had a beautiful neck."  
  
And so it's been this way for months now. He's fast asleep on my bed again and this time it's not just the halcion. I don't need it anymore – I've come to find that he's quite malleable, and he, like most, is easily seduced by glamour and decadence. He doesn't ask for payment anymore, and I'm stingy enough to withhold it, even when he does clean the pool. Once a week, occasionally twice if either of us devises an excuse that's good enough. Parties are a wonderful excuse, but I don't throw many of those anymore. Too risky. People tend to wonder, though, and so appearances are important to keep up. I guest star at galas, lie and say I'm doing some work on the house. What a trite ruse. He's breathing slowly, steadily, dreaming maybe, his head nestled back into the almost-curls of auburn hair, and I can't stop staring at that neck—_  
  
It was 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning. I snapped back into some semblance of logic and rational thought. They were more like useful companions than necessary things. I tended to rely more on instinct and perception. In the three years, five months and three weeks (exactly) since I'd taken my first victim, I'd never found myself at such a loss. This boy was not even remotely what anyone would call "trouble," but after months of frequenting my big, empty house and inexplicably falling asleep whenever he made an attempt to get to know me, he'd probably begin to grow suspicious. That's what I'd kept telling myself. Here it was, September, and Jirou fell asleep on his own, had stopped asking questions, and even asked me to kiss his neck, to put my fingers around it. I'd asked him, was he into that sort of thing? And he'd answered "not until I met you."   
  
Not until he met me. Part of me had always been greedy for someone who would conform to my peculiarities and treat my whims as law. "Atobe," he'd said, "do it now." So I had, wondering with completely steady hands just what would happen. Four times now, I pressed hard but not hard enough. Not distracted, not even by his perfect neck, the way his face flushed differently from everyone else's – not terror, but pleasure. A little fear. My thumbs bore down on his windpipe, my fingers gripping the tendons like mercurial handles that were tightening and hardening just as responsively as any cock. But four times, now, I'd let go. He never nettled me with confessions or exultations; he just fell asleep, pleased and naked and moaning a little into his slumber. The first time, long before my hands had gone for his neck, while I was still simply keeping him around for fun, considering a collar with a little bell on it, I'd been disgusted with myself that I'd not done away with him. I'd let him wake up filthy as a whore, let him remember, and hadn't said a word. I wondered if he'd come back.   
  
He did. He came, and came, and came back. Something bizarre was happening. "Jirou." "Atobe." We'd greet and dismiss each other easily, almost professionally, if it weren't for that wisp of worship in his voice that left me so painfully beside myself. I'd pick up a working boy from the east side, where the pimps didn't tend to keep very good tabs, and I'd crush that throat instead. Sometimes I liked to snap necks, just to feel the give, the unnatural feeling of the flesh and other soft things left to keep their place where the spine no longer did its work. I was searching, and my peculiarities were evolving again. I was getting better, but I was also getting more unpredictable. Which may or may not have been a good thing. Passion and intensity, instinct and perception. I used to be cold and calculating, with no regard. Bodies were disposable things, and they were never as enjoyable as they should have been.   
  
Murder had even been  _too easy_  for a long time. Then I joined The Empire, and added a few new tricks to my repertoire. Things I learned, things I improved upon and brought back to the table with even more relish. It wasn't really that murder was too easy; I was simply too good at it. The Empire brought a sense of competition to the sport which had been somewhat of a leisure activity until that point. But there was now something possessing me, it seemed, and it was something about this boy's neck.   
  
Four times I'd held him down and strangled him while I fucked him, felt his limit and stopped just there, holding just there, waiting until he came to let go, to actually… _preserve_  him. While he slept, four times now, I'd actually toweled him off with ludicrous care, even salving his neck, never wanting to see the bruises I always left behind. But it was more than just how it looked – it was how it felt, too. Smooth, and slender, but not too slender. Long, but not too long. He slept, and I ran my fingers over it lovingly, wondering how incredible a rush it would be to actually crush it, to gently squeeze – gently, gently, gently, because he deserved nothing less. He would trust me completely to kill him and to love him at the same time. I would keep pressing until the tendons went lax and the pulse gave out beneath my fingers. Such a beautiful death, but it would never be perfect enough. So I kept waiting, kept him in my bed, for my consumption and my viewing.   
  
Besides, he had a family, and that family would wonder. I used these excuses for my own indoctrination and conviction, but it wasn't like the Empire had a Confessional I could visit to say things like "forgive me, father, for I have sinned – I have found the perfect victim and cannot bring myself to kill him."   
  
But was it really that? Was it so simple as not  _wanting_  to kill Jirou, or was it just relying on instinct and perception, until the moment struck? The perfect moment. I was beginning to think it never would arrive. But, then, I'd also thought I'd never see a neck this beautiful, and here it was.   
  
I placed a sweet kiss with a fine port balm on his Adam's apple and finally rose from the bed with a sigh.  
  
This port was for exceptionally special occasions, and the fact that I'd pulled it out was indicative enough of my well-concealed anxiety. A couple of pungent maroon inches swirled in the glass as I moved off the mattress and stood up again. Something about having a big house had made it disconcerting, the first few times I'd dared walk around naked, just sipping a glass of wine and breezing through the different rooms, admiring the fruits of my family's fortune. A part of my mind – the same part that was causing me any anxiety in the first place (I wondered if I could kill it) – expected to see my father around any corner, my mother perhaps, even though I hardly remembered what she looked like.   
  
They made you talk about your first time at The Empire, as sort of an initiation. "First times are boring, aren't they?" I'd said with no small amount of arrogant ennui, and Oshitari had to explain away my reluctance to share as part of my mystique. But it was true. With the exception of Oshitari, who actually had quite the story to tell, I'd yet to meet another killer with anything interesting to say about that first kill. Parallels could be drawn forever between murder and sex, but it was apples and oranges.   
  
I had to think about boring things like my first time as I walked around the house, which was illuminated only by sepia-shaded lamps and the one crystal chandelier in the antechamber. I had to pass under it to get to the ballroom, which is where I liked to spend a lot of quiet time. Gazing out at the water where I'd drowned her – my first. I'd drowned two others there, too. The lake was owned by my family, and I'd be caught dead swimming or fishing in it, anyway. Oshitari said I should buy an alligator on the black market, but I didn't want the risk of that thing growing to my size and turning on the house in due time. Still, the lake made for a lovely view in the moonlight.  
  
First times are boring, and the details are unimportant. The girl was a disposable leftover from high school who came back into my life on the verge of my well-arranged marriage in an attempt to extort money and ruin my name. So many other ways to kill her would have done, really – we had guns in the house, we had knives. I could have bludgeoned her with any number of useless decorative things left scattered about by my then- fiancée. But, no, my hands went for her neck, and it was perfect. I fell out of love with my fiancée immediately, though I'll be the first to contend that I never loved her in the first place. We were financially and genetically compatible to carry on two "pillar of society" lineages, and I could scarcely roll my eyes harder at the concept.   
  
I fell out of love with my betrothed, and I fell in love with the challenge of death-dealing. It had been some time since anything had been a challenge for me. I was too adept at everything else. But I stood over the lifeless body of my first victim in the foyer of my home, staring at my own hands, my heart racing, my body on fire. I was frightened, and it was a thrill. I was never frightened, I was never unsure. Even as I paddled out into the middle of the lake and sloppily pushed her body overboard, struggling a little from the weights I'd tied to her feet, I didn't know if I was doing anything right. I was just going on instinct, on adrenaline. It was almost sad to part with her, with that trophy, but what else could be done?   
  
The engagement was canceled on the basis of irreconcilable differences, which to my family meant a sudden change of a wanton young heart, and to my fiancée meant walking in to find me in bed with another man. Not that I'd planned it, mind you – some things just worked out that perfectly. In the interest of keeping things discreet, I was given the house, and she was given a similarly hand-me-down estate from her own family. Last I heard, she'd become an entertainment lawyer in Santa Cruz.  
  
Oshitari and I had known each other since junior high, being of similar affluent background and having a similar penchant for outclassing one another whenever we could. One-upmanship was our favorite pastime, until we fell into bed together in our mid-twenties and realized that we could take our passions out on each other in much more direct ways. It didn't last very long – we weren't what you would call a compatible match. But the brief affair did get a few important things accomplished. He helped to waylay a marriage I never wanted in the first place, and in return I'd helped him out of what could have been a much more severe jail sentence. But that all comes later.  
  
I'd only joined The Empire last year, and it was at his urging. He was a late bloomer in the sport, but he'd come out in such a tremendous way that I couldn't slight him in the least for having waited. Again, that all comes later.   
  
He'd taught me the virtue of waiting, and so I thought of him as I helped myself to another sip of wine and considered the beautiful young boy on my bed. I didn't much care for marring my victims, which limited my choices as far as fooling around went. Dr. Sakaki had been the one to offer me some helpful alternatives which still left a relatively beautiful corpse. I'd drowned a boy in the sink, which provided the same struggle, tension, and eventual calm of death to my fingers. The vacuum-locked trapdoor in my basement which led to my freezer was a nice alternative, on occasion. I just had little fondness for the length of time it took.  
  
I walked to my study and eased into the soft wingback chair. The laptop I pulled forward on the desk seemed a gauche contrast to the Gilded Age décor of the place, but I assumed then, so did a slaughterhouse-sized freezer buried beneath the foundation. I could see the bedroom from my seat, and watched Jirou's chest rising and falling in pleasant, peaceful slumber while I waited for everything to boot up.   
  
Oshitari was logged on, though that said nothing of whether he was actually in front of his computer. I took another sip of port and, then, my chances.   
  
 **Tannhauser:**  We need to talk.   
  
Actually, we didn't. "Need" was too decisive a word, but it implied an immediacy that would no doubt have Oshitari drop whatever (or whomever) he was doing and refocus his attention. I made no apologies for being manipulative.   
  
It took a full five minutes, but I received my response.  
  
 **PokerFace24:**  And you might be…?  
 **Tannhauser:**  Nude, restless, and drinking at 3:00 am. Glad you're up.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Hang on.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Why the name change, Atobe?  
 **Tannhauser:**  Because I want someone's papal staff to bloom with flowers at my despair.   
 **PokerFace24:**  That wasn't vaguely sexual or anything. Since when do you have despair?  
 **Tannhauser:**  Since when are you surprised that anything I do or say is vaguely sexual? I have despair. I've got more of a problem right now, though.   
 **PokerFace24:**  I can only guess.  
 **Tannhauser:**  You can? Really? Please do.  
 **PokerFace24:**  You still can't kill him.   
 **Tannhauser:**  I sometimes wonder why I ever told you in the first place.  
 **PokerFace24:**  Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on, I suppose. Is he becoming your Venus, oh Prince Tannhauser?  
 **Tannhauser:**  It would be helpful if you actually boosted my confidence, here, instead of mocking me.   
 **PokerFace24:**   _Your_  confidence, Atobe? I hardly think so.   
  
He had a point. It was always clicking at a natural '10'. I decided to jump that train of thought.  
  
 **Tannhauser:**  Have you ever had doubts? I mean, besides with Gakuto.   
  
Gakuto. Now there was a story worthy of Wagnerian opera, if Wagnerian opera could possibly incorporate the modern day, United States law, and a composer who wasn't long dead. Oshitari had been searching himself, searching for a way to break into the pastime I'd come to love so dearly. He spent a good two years searching, and at 24 (hence his screen-name; I found it a sweet commemoration) he finally found what he was looking for. It wasn't the urge, or the ability, or the nerve; he had all of those things well in hand. No, what he found was an excuse – a nubile, delicious, and dangerously underage excuse who dared his way into Oshitari's life with a fake ID at his disposal and a few tequila shots in his belly. There was instant attraction, although Oshitari had sworn he would never fall for anyone he met in a club (he'd also sworn he'd never be taken in by jailbait, either…). Of course, I knew if anything was going to win Oshitari over, it would be someone to appeal to his romantic side, which hid itself far too well. Therefore, I warned him off the sixteen-year-old redhead with the 1000-watt smile and the tendency to do all the silly, saccharine things Oshitari would never do and spout all the treacle Oshitari would never say. He assured me they were only friends, and I never once believed it would end well.   
  
Four months in, he was at my house, we split a bottle of Icewine, and he said "I have to kill him soon."   
  
I was overjoyed, to be perfectly honest. Happy that I'd finally have a friend in my endeavors, offering him all the tips I could, helping to plot the scenario. He was not as enthused, to be honest, as I was. Killing Gakuto was a means to an end, not a means to a beginning. Although that is exactly what it would have been, one way or the other. I'd tease him about the emotional torment it caused him, but sometimes his silences were barbed with an electric defensiveness, and it staid any further testing of my limits.   
  
He was falling for him, as if that were any shock to my system. Turns out they'd even gone so far as to discuss a shared fascination with serial killers. One thing was bound to lead to the inevitable other. Of all the options, a broken heart over killing Gakuto seemed a small price to pay versus having to register as a sex offender the rest of his days. A perfect excuse. I prodded him into it. He made a date, although Gakuto had been under a strict watch by his parents, who would be far less happy to learn that their son was consorting with someone like Oshitari (the internet is a beautiful thing) than they had been to find out about his other delinquent behavior.   
  
After leaving the club where they'd first met, that fateful night four months later, they hailed a taxi and Oshitari told the driver to take them to the docks. The docks were right out of a Martin Scorsese film, the leftovers of a once-thriving fishing community that had shriveled up and died when the city's focus turned more to finance and technology. It was a great choice for either a spooky romantic stroll, an intimate homicide, or both.   
  
It still would have been a means to a beginning, but sometimes destiny likes to make a web of your aspirations, your goals. Gakuto stared up at Oshitari in the backseat of the cab, and they looked at each other for a long, silent while, until Gakuto ushered him down, kissed him lightly, and whispered in his ear as quiet as a mouse: "I think we should kill him."   
  
Less than an hour later, they had. It was a messy kill, but it was winter, which provided enough incriminating clothing to dispose of. The cooperation was second nature, the thrill was invigorating, and they were full of enough adrenaline to take off running for Gakuto's home, several miles away. His parents were at the symphony. He knew how to work the gas fireplace.  
  
They were breathless and sweating, and no less inclined to tear into each other as they tore out of their clothes. "Right in the living room?" I'd asked him after the trial. "How could you have been so stupid?"  
  
"Easy," he answered, and I felt an icy knife of jealousy stab me in the heart, "I knew I was in love."   
  
Of course no one would suspect them of the cabbie's murder if the very same night turned out to be the night Oshitari was accused of and jailed for statutory rape. The defense team –  _my_  defense team, out of  _my_  pocket (as opposed to the judge, who happened to be  _in_  it) – called Gakuto himself to the stand to attest to the consensual nature of their relationship, and specifically that night. I sat in the courtroom, biting my cheek to keep from snickering. It was all so very melodramatic.  
  
With my behind-the-scenes sway, and Gakuto's heartfelt testimony, the judge was inclined to give Oshitari a startlingly minimal sentence. He was out on good behavior before Gakuto turned 18, but the boy had been moved far, far away by his parents, who would take no chances. Of course, the two star-crossed lovers found a way around it (again, the internet is a beautiful thing), and Oshitari's 18th birthday present to Gakuto was a one-way ticket back home ( _his_  home, precisely).   
  
I found the overly-excitable youngster to be tiring, and I found the murder tactics they'd hatched together to be a bit beyond the scope of my own style. This didn't stop me from being intrigued. Half the reason I asked Oshitari to regale me with some conversation that night was simply to stave off the gnawing anxiety that I might find myself ensnared in the same young, beautiful sort of trap.   
  
As long as it's taken to relate the tale is about how long it took Oshitari to respond.   
  
 **PokerFace24:**  Not since him, no. It might help you to become attached.   
 **Tannhauser:**  *retch* Why does everyone in a relationship have to try and foist that way of thinking off on someone else? It's like a cult. And what took you so long?   
 **PokerFace24:**  You're practically in a relationship, asshole. You've been fucking him for…what now…four months?  
  
It seemed too snide that he would pull out such an auspicious anniversary, and have it be right.   
  
 **Tannhauser:**  I don't even know his last name.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Akutagawa.  
 **Tannhauser:**  Excuse me?  
 **PokerFace24:**  I did a little looking up on your pool boy for you. He's a good student. Just about to graduate, too. It would be a shame if he didn't…  
 **Tannhauser:**  I feel more than slightly violated.   
 **PokerFace24:**  It wouldn't be the first time.   
 **Tannhauser:**  How would your precious other half feel to know that you're talking to me like this? Bringing up old times?   
 **PokerFace24:**  Good point. Maybe we should change the topic.   
  
I'd chugged through the last of my port in the throes of sudden, understandable indignation. Oshitari's conceding to stop the banter was another stab at me. I wondered just how well he knew this affect he had on me.   
  
 **Tannhauser:**  Fine. How would you kill him, then, if you had to do it?   
 **PokerFace24:**  Your pool boy?   
 **Tannhauser:**  No, Gakuto… Of course I mean Jirou.   
  
I could almost see him smirking, the tall, dark, handsome lecher.  
  
 **PokerFace24:**  Depends. What's pretty about him? And don't say his neck. I know about his neck.   
 **Tannhauser:**  There's just something about it.   
 **PokerFace24:**  What else is there?   
 **Tannhauser:**  Great thighs. Shapely, actually.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Is he shapely, in general?  
 **Tannhauser:**  Not especially, but there are exceptions. He's skinny through the arms, the chest, the ankles…but his stomach has this taut bulge to it – probably because he back is so curved. And his ass.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Oh?  
  
What I had for necks, Oshitari had for asses. I knew this first-hand. Mine wasn't anything to sneeze at, apparently. What I wanted to say in response was far less visceral than what came out. Talking to Oshitari always upped my provocative side.  
  
 **Tannhauser:**  It's something you can certainly sink your fingers into.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Bleed him out.  
  
My hands lingered over the keyboard for a moment, and my reaction was far too personal to be good for business, as it were. Still, I found the courage to type again, after a cursory glance at the bedroom.   
  
 **Tannhauser:**  Go on.  
  
I went to the kitchen and retrieved a glass of water, mindful to keep enough of that port on hand for the next time I had an attack of conscience. I ambled around the kitchen, then, walking off a bit of a rush, knowing that it would take Oshitari some time to respond. When I returned to the study and turned the laptop towards me, sure enough, I found quite a bit to scroll through. I unhooked the machine, it switched to battery power with a familiar 'whirr', and I walked it into the bedroom. I sat on the bed with it, next to Jirou, going about a murderer's closest approximation of masturbation.   
  
 **PokerFace24:**  You'd want to do this on a disposable surface, or else you'll have too much to clean up. I'd actually suggest you making an investment in an entirely new bed, once it's done, but I just prefer the floor of the lab.   
  
"The lab" is what Oshitari called their base of operations – the sterile, blindingly white room with tiled floors and a drain in the center. I'd been invited to watch the two of them working a victim over, last Spring, and while it hadn't turned my stomach, it had been enough to convince me that I had nothing on the methodical carnality of my childhood friend and his live-in minion.  
  
 **PokerFace24:**  A test cut is always great, just to give them the feeling of what's to come. To see them squirm, maybe try to struggle. I suggest the stomach, then – just above the navel. Not too deep, but enough to bleed. It's a beautiful place to cut a boy, especially a pale one. You can take this time to be as gentle and caressing as you want – now, I know you don't have a taste for blood, but…never mind, you don't have a taste for blood.  
  
I reached out as I read, and touched the spot above Jirou's navel, feeling the flesh lurch under my touch as he murmured in his sleep. He shifted a little, throwing one arm over his head. I dragged my finger across the pale, slightly plump spot, and he made another little noise, something between a coo and a giggle. My fingers danced in the air over the spot as I imagined a dark red line forming there, beading and overflowing into his bellybutton and then down between his legs. That's where my fingers wanted to go, to follow the diaphanous trail of auburn hair, imagining what it would look like, clung with red, standing out from his skin. But I still had some reading to do.  
  
 **PokerFace24:**  You've never cut an Achilles' tendon before, and I hardly expect you to, so I won't go into specifics. You'd need a bigger knife, and a good, firm slice. You can't botch this, or else it just looks messy and all the grace is gone. But that's what you do next. Cut his Achilles' tendons – both of them. You say he's skinny through the ankles – makes it easier. If he passes out from pain, you'll want to wait until he wakes up again, maybe even force him to before he bleeds too much. Another cut is always good, then, for that purpose. Untie him, unchain him, un-whatever-it-is-you-need-to-do. He's not going anywhere now. Now, where to make the next cut is crucial. But I suggest those thighs of his you went on about. The inside, near the groin, where the flesh is most tender.   
 **PokerFace24:**  Atobe, are you even there?   
  
I'd parted Jirou's legs gently, and I had stopped tracing with my fingers and had started tracing with my tongue. There was no way Oshitari's slice-and-dice strategem of terror could be as nice as this. Screams weren't appealing to me, and he had been right about the blood, about the Achilles' tendons. I wouldn't go so far as to call him unrefined – he was very refined, actually – but our tastes, literally and figuratively, simply ran different courses.   
  
Jirou was practically talking and moving in his sleep as he reacted to me, mumbling my name and something about the time, something about how he should be home by now. Then a drowsy laugh that made my head spin just as dangerously as the indignation had. His thighs still tasted very faintly like the soap and water I'd washed him with, and even though I called him a pet in my mind I knew I'd never taken care of a pet this lovingly, this thoroughly.  
  
I fondled his cock and kissed it, opening one eye to glance over at the computer screen.   
  
 **PokerFace24:**  You just don't want me to say a damned thing about cutting his throat, do you?  
  
Indeed, I didn't. I snapped the laptop shut and shoved it aside, focusing on my boy. My hands held onto the flesh of his thighs protectively, even as he squeezed them in on my head a little, even as he spread them wide and drew sharper, louder gasps.   
  
I had to kill him. But it had to be perfect.   
  
 _The boy doesn't have a life to speak of that hasn't been drawn in or torn asunder by me. If those good grades continue I'll be astonished and impressed. He fights with his parents, now, but they're largely ambivalent, convinced they've lost control at the cusp of his manhood. He tells them he's staying with friends and they think he's a deviant, or a drug addict, or both. The truth is, he couldn't be sweeter. He couldn't be more careful. He couldn't be more naïve and suggestible, and I'm only lucky that I got to him first. He pulls me up to kiss him after he comes, and I latch onto his neck, feeling the vibration of his post-orgasmic moans under my lips. What a shame it would be, to lose that feeling. A lifeless neck is so boring compared to this. But not every neck is like this, and it's not just the neck. I finally realize this.  
  
Oshitari's boy was looking for trouble. Oshitari's boy was and is trouble. But mine is finer, mine is more delicate, mine is a rose. I'll beat Oshitari. I'll finally beat him in this. _  
  
The phone rang while I was fucking him gently, and though my head snapped toward the parlor and I blurted out "god _damn_ it!", he turned my face back to his, and kissed me as he pulled one of my hands up to touch his throat. I was about to dig my thumbs in when I heard Oshitari's voice on the answering machine.   
  
"Sakaki was murdered. I have every reason to think Tezuka is behind this, and Mizuki agrees with me. I can't get a hold of the others, but we can't risk a meeting right now. We're going dark. You be the most careful," my entire body went cold when he mentioned Tezuka, and I froze. Jirou looked entirely too uncomfortable, but I didn't want to lose him. I mouthed some random soothing remark down at him along with an apology, as I waited. It took Oshitari a few seconds to clear his throat and end his message, "I hope I'm not…interrupting anything."   
  
Click.   
  
"Atobe…?"   
  
"It's nothing, don't worry about it."   
  
"Can I stay the rest of the night, anyway?"   
  
My boy was a rose, and even if he suspected anything, he wasn't afraid. Maybe he would have been, until he met me. "Be my guest."   
  
I turned away from him to feign sleep, but he chanced the proximity and held me from behind in an intense embrace. "You fascinate me." He said, so softly that I might have missed it if I hadn't been listening to the rhythm of his every breath.   
  
"You have no idea." I replied, not sure what to think, and in fact quite convinced that thinking was the last thing I should have been doing.


	4. Sengoku

"You can fuck me or something, if that's what you want. I mean, I guess it would be fair." 

So how do you figure a nice guy like me wound up in a situation like this? I suppose I was just lucky. Unusual things happen when you're lucky, and it's all in looking at them from the right angle. People accused me of being an optimist, before. They never realized that optimism is just the tarted-up cousin of Looking For an Angle. I got where I was on wits as much as I got there by chance, even if being a larcenist and a fence took more balls than it took either of those two things. I'd been making a steady living. Well-connected, tricky, lucky. That is, until I was arrested. Bit of a lame fuck-up, that one, and hardly my fault. You trust the wrong people, and that's what happens. But I was released on bail (lucky again – it helped that the judge was known to be lenient on those who cleaned up nicely, and I cleaned up very nicely), and that's when it all started to move too fast. 

I supposed I'd have to explain this all to the rich guy sitting across from me, but for now I was looking for an angle. 

"Do you really think that's what I want? Did you even consider I might find that an insult before you asked?" He was sort of sharkish, but no less pleasant to sight or sound. Sitting in his easy chair, one skinny leg crossed over the other, wearing a pair of expensive-looking pin-striped pajamas. I'd always wondered who really wore that type of pajamas. Rich guys, I guess. He was too slight for any chair in the room, to be honest, but there was a presence about him that filled it well enough. He leaned against one crooked wrist and gave me a sleepy smile, his eyes not even really open. A strange face. A handsome face. There was a genuine femininity about him, so I didn't feel sorry at all for having made my little offer. 

I'd been the one to jump his garden wall. But then, I'd also been the one to jump bail, and this new bounty hunter on the prowl was already well-known for being everything other bounty hunters in this city weren't – that is to say, good at his job. When you land in a rich guy's backyard at 2:00 a.m., running from a bounty hunter, it's usually the end of the line when you get caught by the head of the household. But my luck hadn't run out yet. 

When I didn't reply to his duo of questions, my unusual host went on, after sipping from a porcelain cup full of what smelled like the strongest Darjheeling tea in the world. "What's your name again?" 

I'd woken him up at 2:00 a.m. and he'd found me hiding on his portico. Yet all he'd done since finding me was smile, and talk to me like this – softly, evenly, like he'd practiced these lines or something equally ridiculous to imagine. "It's…Sengoku." No use in coming up with an alias. He was aiding and abetting, at this point. He might as well be dragged down with me, I figured.

"And you're how old?" 

I felt like I was being quizzed by a professor, suddenly. It made me a bit defensive. I had a bad habit of getting that way. My eyes narrowed, and I sat up a little straighter, eyeing him sideways. "24. Why? How old are you? And what's your name?"

"You can call me Fuji, if you'd like. I'm not much older than you." 

"And this is your house." I didn't ask it; I challenged the very possibility with my tone, which was naturally a little sarcastic to begin. The house seemed new – too much metal and glass everywhere to be an antique. It was probably some small-time architect's magnum opus. I had to admit I sort of liked it. A little more color around the place would have been nice, but it seemed a nice fit to its owner.

"My family is wealthy. I'm privileged." 

"Well, obviously." I rubbed the knees of my dirty jeans and looked around. Antsy, that's how I felt. It was one of those weird feelings that you'd read about or hear about, but never quite know until you were there. "Listen. This whole situation's really weird, and I just think that if—" 

"Do you make it a habit, whoring yourself for favors? I don't think you do, from the look of you. I don't think you'd need to." Between his thumb and forefinger, he plucked up something slippery-looking and beige-ish from a dish on the coffee table and chewed it without taking his eyes (which I still couldn't see) from me. 

Was he flattering me? Was he insulting me? I couldn't decide. Antsy, and now befuddled to go along with it. Of all the estates I had to drop into…

But it was important that I not piss this guy off. "No. I've got a girlfriend, actually." 

Four, if I wanted to be honest, which I really didn't. 

"That's interesting. Is it serious?"

"Kind of." With two of them, it was. For them. Especially the pregnant one.

"You keep looking at the phone, Sengoku. And at the door. There's no need to worry. I told you already that you could stay here if you're in trouble. Maybe some tea would calm you down?" 

That stuff smelled like it could take the paint off a wall. I couldn't imagine it being any easier on my taste buds. "No, thanks. I'm just wondering what's in this for you." 

"I suppose that's how criminals think, isn't it?" I didn't care that he'd declared himself not much older than me. He acted and talked like he was not even of this world. There was a funny lilt to his tone in that last remark, but I didn't dwell on it. I glanced at the little plate next to his teacup and saucer, trying to figure out what he was eating. I finally recognized it as ginger. Fresh ginger. "Maybe I'm just curious. Why don't you tell me why you were running?" 

That was one of those questions that merited nothing but the most incredulous answer. "Because I didn't want to be manhandled by a bounty hunter?" I made it a question out of habitual irreverence, not out of any particular desire to seem like a smart-ass.

He laughed gently, brushing his lips with the knuckle of his index finger. "He didn't look so bad to me." 

I supposed I was going to have to start calling him Fuji, at least in my head, but it didn't really feel right in any case. I wondered if I was dreaming, hallucinating. If I'd been beaned at the base of the neck with a blunt instrument and was going to wake up in a cell any moment now. Fuji had been so kind as to offer me the kitchen to hide in as he answered the door about twenty minutes ago, not very long after our first words were exchanged. As I'd ducked against the center island and tried to hold my breath, checking to make sure I wasn't reflecting in the damned glass that seemed to be everywhere, I heard him talking to the guy who'd been on my tail. I hadn't listened very carefully. All his words sounded the same from a few yards away – a dulcet tone that would have made him a perfect liar. That's when I started to question his motives.

"I don't want the chance to find out. Thanks." 

"His name is Taka, you know. He's our age, and owns a coffeehouse, of all things. An upstanding young man. Never expected him to go into bounty hunting, honestly, but," the aunt who's always quietly judging you. That's who he reminded me of. I just assumed everyone had one of those aunts. I had three. He folded his hands in his lap and leaned back, "I'm rambling. What do you do? That would have Taka chasing after you, I mean." 

"I steal stuff. And I'm a fence. That pays better. But it's more dangerous." 

"I would imagine." 

"What do you do?" 

"You sound awfully tense, Sengoku. I understand that you've had a difficult night, but…please, try to calm down. Don't be so gruff. I'll tell you what…" he rose from his chair, wispy body and wispy hair and…something about him just seemed alien. Supernatural, at the very least. Of course that couldn't be possible, but there was no way I'd think of this guy as anything but a creep if it weren't for that…something. He looked down at his tea and his ginger, as if considering whether to clean it up right away, and then tossed his hair very subtly. Feminine, yes, but very calculated, very controlled. Fuji smiled at me, though I'd already gathered that he rarely did anything else with his face, "let's talk just a little more about you, I'll mix you a drink, and I'll show you what I do for a living. Do you like cognac? I've been holding onto a bottle of Louis XIII that's sure to take the edge off of any rough night." 

"I've never been into cognac." I stood up as well and slid my hands into my pockets. When Fuji regarded my answer I could swear he did so with a flare of an angry expression, but that was probably my imagination. He was smiling again so quickly that it might have just been a trick of the light.

"I have beer, too, if that's more palatable, but I find it oddly charming that you'd turn down something that costs more than $4000 a bottle." 

"That doesn't mean it tastes any better."

"I said I find it oddly charming. I'll get you a glass of water. Please, come into the gallery." 

I followed him as he padded along in his bare feet. The narrow, white hallways of the ground floor were accented by recessed mood lighting, making the place seem just slightly less like an overdressed hospital. At the end of the hallway, he pushed open a large red door and flipped on a light just inside. "I'll get your water," he said, "take a look at my work, I'll be glad to hear what you think." 

For a moment I was terrified that I was about to be subjected to modern art or boring watercolors of birds and fish. But my surprise was as genuine as my beffudlement. Fuji, it seemed from the 4-foot-high black and white pieces hanging, evenly spaced, around the cavernous gallery, was a photographer. And not just any photographer. There were faces staring back at me from the walls. The portraits were each unique and very stark – bright whites, absolute blacks, and as many shades of grey as there were colors on any given boring watercolor of birds and fish. It wasn't until I was on the fourth piece that I realized the unifying theme. 

"They're all boys," I said, uneasily, as Fuji walked back in carrying a glass of water for me. I needed it more than I had before. Something about these photos made me feel like I was looking at ghosts, or gods, or some strange mixture of the two. Angels? I couldn't quite be called straight as a rod, but I tried to be. These portraits were making it difficult to maintain that self-appraisal. 

"They are," he sighed, as if my unspoken concern was common. "I'll be honest: a true portrait artist is never really satisfied with his work. I've tried to mix in some of my older work with some of the newer ones, to level out what I consider to be mediocrity." I couldn't see what he was talking about; all of the photographs were unnerving and classic. But then, I wouldn't know artistry if it bit me on the ass. I just knew what the faces and the lighting and the shades of grey were doing to my emotions. "I really want to capture vulnerability, desperation. Not pain, exactly. But truth. That must sound like a bunch of nonsense, to you." 

It was my turn to wonder if he'd even considered that I'd be insulted. "What do you mean by that?" 

"You don't really seem the art type, so I don't imagine you'd care." 

I'd finished most of the water in my glass. Stopping in front of a particularly eye-catching print, I overlooked his words and loosened up my lips. "Two of my friends were supposed to pick me up, take me down to Mexico before my court date. They never showed. I got one cell phone message, and they said they'd run into trouble with their car, but I knew they were fucking with me. I was just about ready to go and face charges, but I decided to run. I don't know why." I felt like talking more, but the portrait lulled me into silence. "Who's this?" 

Fuji might have been at my side the entire time, but when he spoke I suddenly felt him there, more imposing than I'd felt anything before. It had to be the shades of grey, and all those faces. They were making me feel like anything but myself. Small. Impossible. A little bit hopeless. "This is my very best friend." 

Nothing like the rest, this one. I must have stared at it for a few minutes. The water was gone. This face wasn't vulnerable or desperate, but it was just as jarring as the others. I wondered if he considered it mediocre, and so I didn't want to say it was my favorite. The subject; he was more man than boy, or maybe it was just in his eyes, just in the way he stared at the camera like he was accusing it of something, like he was accusing me of everything I really was. A thief. A cheat. A deadbeat. A charlatan. It was my favorite, but I hated it. And I couldn't stop staring at it. 

"He doesn't look like he was very pleased with you when you took this." 

"Oh, Tezuka often isn't. Sengoku, come here," he touched my shoulder, and I found that his fingers were quite firm despite their long, spindly appearance, "I'll show you some of the ones I haven't put on display quite yet." 

Now, I'd been screwed by a few fags, both literally and figuratively. Otherwise I would have been able to claim that "straight as a rod" thing without exception. But the moment your backdoor ceases to be Exit Only, you accept the possibility that you're somewhere closer to the middle of the Kinsey scale. Me? Oh, I just liked sex. I also knew the power of my own good looks. My ass was a good bargaining chip, if it had to be.

Something about Fuji was mysteriously, relentlessly sexy, despite the creepiness and the unfathomable androgyny. Perhaps because of these things, I sort of wanted him to accept the physical gratitude I'd offered. Instead, there were apparently more photos to see, more monotony to endure. I'd been captivated by the photo of…what had that name been?…but I felt very strangely like all the eyes were staring into me, now. Not just superficially. My brain was wavering a little as Fuji's hand remained on me, first on my shoulder and then on my waist, guiding me down another claustrophobic hallway. The white of the walls and the floor sank into one another, becoming milky, becoming indistinguishable. Fuji took the water glass from my hand as I leaned into him fully, grasping at his silk pajama shirt. 

"I don't feel…" 'quite all right?' 'well?' 'myself?' 'my nose?' All were true, but I didn't feel particularly bad, either. 

"You feel much more relaxed now, don't you, Sengoku?" He walked me into a dark room. I was practically dragging my feet at that point. 

"Uh-huh." I answered without closing my mouth. He held me up and flipped a light switch. My hand was rubbing the silk on his chest, now. I could feel his nipples beneath the fabric, and for some reason I just kept rubbing harder. There was no detectable difference in his smile, but I could feel it. I could feel everything, from the colors of the room to the sound of the light. Not as many whites, in here – there were dark, royal blue walls, with bold shades of red and emerald and gold all around me. Still, the whole thing smacked of angles and geometry and things new and calculable. It felt like being a kid again, and only knowing the basics. There was a big, simple bed that shouted "hi!" and curtains with gilded tassels I could almost taste. Like butterscotch cotton candy. The lamps were done in some modern design that reminded me of what gumballs feel like – all round and smooth and shiny. 

"…mmmm pictures?" I think I started the sentence, but can't be certain. Mumbling into someone's shoulder can't really be called articulating. 

"Yes, yes," he addressed me still like one of those aunts who were constantly judging me, but my aunts were far less likely to ever push me forward by the ass with an obvious, lingering clutch that felt way too good, "you go sit on the bed, there. I'll get the album. Careful, now." 

That last he said, almost disinterestedly, as I ran into a lacquer dressing screen and my knees went all wobbly. Still, I didn't really feel bad. I actually laughed, and slid onto the mattress, onto the bright red duvet that was talking to me in a light, friendly voice. I rolled over once on it, smiling, and when I looked back up Fuji was there again. He was holding a camera. The flash went off, and I made a weird face. 

"I want to take your photograph," he said with a sunny tone, tilting his head at me a bit. His hair looked like it was constantly underwater, flowing perfectly, so shiny and smooth. I nodded, and grinned, and he snapped another picture. The flashes were like fireworks, and I felt like one of the angels in those hanging portraits, in black and white and shades of grey. Is that where I'd end up? My mouth was full of butterscotch cotton candy. I opened it, but only laughed a little.

"Look at me." I wasn't sure if my eyes could focus on anything but him. He was glowing. There was a light all around him. He felt familiar, and he was the only person I trusted. The only person who knew me, in the entire world. I started unbuttoning my shirt, on my knees, biting my lower lip. His face didn't change – smiling, squinting as the flash went off over and over and over. That glow around him only grew. I was making it grow, I realized. Oh, please, blot out everything else, I thought, leave only him, and only me.

I shrugged out of my shirt but I didn't really pull it all the way off. I just let it hang there, and became distracted by the softness of the mattress. I kneaded it with my fingers, bouncing a time or two on my hands and knees. 

Fuji took a few more pictures, and then he leaned down. Don't go away, I thought, pouting. He snapped this expression up and into his camera without even looking, and moments later was back with a big book that looked like it was made of licorice and filled with graham crackers. It was the size of my chest, roughly. Fuji reached in and touched it – my chest, not the book – and a wisp of his light clung to me. Like a spider's silk. I reached out for the strand I could see, grabbing the air, but his perfect fingers took my hand and led them to the book. He helped me to open it. 

There were smaller photos in there. There were pretty, I thought. The boy on the very first page was pretty. The bold colors of the room made perfect blacks and greys, and his skin made a milky white. 

"He was a redhead, like you. Sometimes I dislike greyscale; it takes so much beauty out of something like perfect red hair." I wondered for a flash about my unborn child, and whether he or she would have red hair like me, if the girl even ended up keeping the baby. The bed laughed at me for thinking this. The boy in the pictures laughed, too, and I turned the page. His face was closer, and I saw freckles just under his eyes. "Are you a natural redhead, Sengoku?" I wanted to nod, but I only smiled and bit my lip, turning another page. 

I saw and felt the fireworks of Fuji's camera, and then I looked up, my expression one of concerned confusion. Did Fuji take pictures of dolls? But this wasn't a doll. The thing in the pictures on these two pages looked like the boy before. I flipped between them. There was no mistaking those freckles, those almond-shaped eyes. But on the new pages I'd uncovered, the eyes weren't looking at anything. 

"Don't worry. I know you can't really talk. I'll find out about your hair soon enough." He was checking the settings on his camera.

This boy had turned into a doll, posed and dressed elaborately. I ran my fingers over the pages and saw them rippling beneath my touch like disturbed pools of water. They weren't really doing that, were they? The bed wasn't really talking to me, was it? Mumbling things, suggesting that I show Fuji even more of myself? This wasn't real. The boy's legs were askew in the pictures, askew and unnatural like a doll's. He wasn't dressed the same and there were dark stains on his arms and on his legs, like paint or makeup, running down and pooling in spots. 

Fuji sat next to me, carefully watching me. Sometimes the flash would go off right next to my cheek. The camera was hot. Fuji's hand was not so hot as it was prickly and electric, touching my thigh. "I broke his legs, because I thought he'd look good as a doll. Do you like his costume? Hm? Look at me." He stopped touching my thigh and held my chin, turning it until I faced him. I stared, confused but happy to see him, as he took a few pictures. Then he pointed down to his book again, and I followed his spider-silk glow, watched it engulf the pages as he turned them. "Now this boy…watch now, Sengoku. Don’t close your eyes or the devil will get you…this boy reminded me of my brother. So after I'd poisoned him, I cut his hair and dressed him like my brother. I even cut his forehead so he'd have a scar like Yuuta's. And you see, in these pictures, how I tied him up and made him do just what I wanted? He was so obedient, and living boys are never that way. Especially brothers. I like these pictures the best." I touched the photo of a naked boy all done up in artful knots, and nodded. The bed was talking a lot now. I told it to shut up so I could hear Fuji. 

"I like to fuck these boys after they're dead. Do you understand? Yes? Is that a no? Do you want me to take your picture again? Okay…" 

Click. Flash. Whirr. I was being pushed back onto the bed, gently. "I liked it when you were talking. You really did amuse me, Sengoku, so I'm sorry for the little cocktail I slipped into your water. Benzodiazepine, mostly, with some psychotropics. Not lethal, I assure you. I pay good money to make sure it isn't. Most of the time, I hate to be robbed of the opportunity to kill someone myself. Even if it is on short notice. I didn't have any time to plan for you, did I?" He was taking off my pants, and I was letting him. I was even aiding him, lifting my hips and bucking them into his touch. I wondered if, when he fucked me, I'd feel his glow all inside of me, all the way up to the back of my throat. I wanted to be filled up completely, and fucked hard, and I wanted to tell him this. I made a little squealing noise. It was all I could do. "I'll take your picture a lot, I think. You deserve something imaginative, something painful to punish you for your crimes against society. Here…" He reached down for a photo from the book.

"Look at this boy. What's left of him." 

I blinked at the picture of dark, dark pools augmented by bright white skin. Two arms. Two legs. A torso. A head. The contrast of the black and the white was so high that I couldn't even determine features. "You've probably never seen 'Anatomy of a Murder', but it has a very famous poster. I always loved that artwork, so I sort of…recreated it. It's not very artistic, granted, since I'm only imitating a work of art by Saul Bass, but I worked very hard on the positioning, on the lighting. Cutting a corpse up was also something I'd never done. That was the hardest part. Later, I fucked his esophagus." He tousled my hair. I couldn't help but smile. His touch felt like his glow, very light and protective and prickly. It was all in my hair, now. I was naked. "You know, it's so fortunate that you stumbled my way. I've been missing my playmates for some time, and even Tezuka tells me it's not safe to rent my company for the time being. He has a secret that he's not telling me. I'd kill him, you know…but he's so dear to me, and besides, I want to know his secret. Tezuka won't let me fuck him either. Like Yuuta. I was lucky enough to find a boy who looked like Yuuta, though. With Tezuka, not so much. Sengoku…you like me, don't you?"

I sort of nodded. He was stroking me, and I was hard for him. The bed was cooing a lullaby in my ear. The butterscotch cotton candy was melting, trickling down my throat. 

"Good, because I like you. I want to punish you, but you have to understand that it's because I care about you, okay?"

I nodded again.

"You are a natural redhead." 

There came a terrible, searing pain that made my thighs go numb and my guts turn inside-out. My capacity for rational thought half-returned in a furious flash, but of course it didn't last. I barely managed to think I am going to die before I wrenched my eyes open, choking on the coppery taste of blood before I could even open my mouth to scream. I'd never put any stock in religion, and I had, in fact, believed that I was going to live forever (or at least until I didn't care what happened to me anymore). So, I'd never worried about God. I never thought I'd see his face. Tears welled and my eyes crossed, but the face of God had big blue eyes that saw through my wasted life in its last few minutes as He fucked me with what I could only assume was the long, auspicious ice pick I'd seen, and almost picked up myself, in the kitchen.


	5. Choutarou

We grew up together in Cedarfield, a little 'burb on the outskirts of town. I was four and he was six when we met, on the playground at the end of Silver Street. To each others' families, we were just like sons, like brothers through all our school years from Cedarfield Elementary to Central High. We kept going to the playground at the end of Silver Street, graduating in time from the sandbox to the slides, from the slides to the tennis and basketball courts. Eventually it came time to move on and move out, and though we could barely conceive of leaving Silver Street, we knew we could never leave each other. It's not that Shishido and I really came to the realization of any deeper attachment to each other until our 20's – but we were brothers, all the way down to the occasional bullying (of me, by him) and the shared holidays. So there we were, a few weeks before graduation, sitting on the swings as the sun sank down behind the trees, wondering. That's when we decided to go to school together, with the intention of a business partnership. What sort of business was a no-brainer, though it may have seemed to our parents that we were chasing a juvenile dream. All I can say is that we'd been playing detectives since first grade, and though we spoke earnestly of careers in criminal justice, neither of us really wanted to work our way up any ridiculous chain of command. 

After college we spent our first patch of considerable time away from each other, as Shishido served for a stint in the highway patrol and I went to work for a defense attorney in the state capitol. At some point he called my consistent phone calls "lame" and I was terrified that I was on the brink of a rotten shut-down by my best and, in some capacities, only friend. But, the more I thought about it, consistent phone calls were lame, and the old adage about absence and the heart growing fonder was indeed true. My imagination dealt well enough with the stretches of non-communication, and our e-mails to each other got longer, going on about a business plan, waxing fantastical about the perfect little brownstone office and all the connections and financial collateral we'd need to get started. Two Christmases ago he told me to "get in the car" after the big joint family dinner, and he drove me downtown to look at a building on S.E. 39th Street. He asked me how much I had in my savings account, how good my credit was, if he thought the attorney I worked for was in need of a couple of professional investigators. It was, without a doubt, the best Christmas ever.

We named our agency Silver Private Investigative Services, in honor of our roots. Office downstairs, apartment upstairs. I wanted a dog, Shishido didn't want the responsibility. "Choutarou, seriously, what will the clients think if we have a dog in the office?" We still spent our birthdays and holidays at home with our two families, and last Fourth of July Shishido's mom pulled me into the kitchen under the guise of needing my help with the cornbread. She asked me, with a mysterious little smile, whether her son and I were together. With a shy little smile, I realized that it was no use lying to my second mother. She said she'd known since we started college. Coincidentally (or…actually…not), that was about the time Shishido and I began sleeping together.

It had taken an analysis of all our past relationships – the revelation that every former girlfriend had left me because of Shishido, or Shishido because of me. "Well, you are the most important person in my life," I'd told him, "and any girl who doesn't understand that isn't really worth it." He agreed in his own way, staring off at the skyline while we sat on the hood of his car, splitting a beer and a joint. I think he gave a thoughtful little grunt before he said "Well, let's just date each other, then." 

I choked on pot smoke, which is never a pleasant thing, and traded the joint for the Budweiser to wash the taste down. My eyebrows bowed in critical confusion. "What, seriously?" I wheezed. 

"Choutarou, you're practically a lesbian, okay? Most girls who date you stay friends with you, right?" 

"Well, yeah. Not any bad blood that I can remember since middle school and the incident with Lindsay Cook."

"Yeah. That doesn't happen to straight guys." 

"It happens to you."

"Because I'm an asshole, not because I'm a typical straight guy." 

"I thought that was the defining characteristic of the typical straight guy." 

"See, see, right there. You're a girl." 

"Bullshit. You're friends with Charla whatshername."

"Charlé is a lesbian, and apparently it took dating me for her to realize this. She won't stop thanking me." 

I laughed, and he smacked the back of my head. 

"Sorry." 

"Ever eat pussy?" 

"Ew, no." 

"Warning sign number 2. Me neither." 

"Well, I'm not that enthusiastic about sucking a dick, either, if you want to split hairs!" 

"What about fucking another guy, though?" He looked at me, bringing one knee up to his chest. "You know, specifically me, because I'll be damned if you'd cheat on me."

The details of the rest of that conversation are a little embarrassing – in fact, the entire story up until then is a little embarrassing, too. But to spare any good impressions anyone may have of me, I'll skip ahead. Five years after the fateful discussion, about ten months or so after the commiseration with Shishido's mom (who promised not to tell my father), we hadn't changed all that much. I still had about four inches on him (height-wise…get your minds out of the collective gutter, for goodness' sake), he still called most of the professional and personal shots, and I remained as contrary as I'd always been. And he as stubborn. 

"Not Quizno's." 

I narrowed my eyes and tilted my head. "Now, I'm fine with you suggesting whatever you want, but canceling out one restaurant – my favorite – doesn't help." 

"I just knew you were going to suggest it, if I gave you the chance, and they stopped making the one sandwich I ever liked. Lame. Not Quizno's." 

This, as we thumbed over a spread of surveillance photos from an old case that was suddenly new again. Seems the wife whose husband was cheating on her a few months back suddenly felt harassed and endangered, and was seeking a restraining order. Figuring out the future subject of said restraining order was our job. To make matters more interesting than they usually tended to be, it wasn't just any wife – she was Superintendent of the county's school system. Lawyers, public officials, media personalities – it was our business, at the heart of it, to deal with the dirty laundry of those who couldn't afford to air it publicly. People who could more than afford to pay to make it go away.

The police force in our city was notoriously incorruptible, something that had come about recently with the appointment of a new chief who seemed to genuinely believe in truth and justice. Business was booming on our end, as the peccadilloes we dealt in rarely emerged from upholding the law in the first place. We should have drafted a Thank You letter to Chief Tachibana some time ago. 

"Hard to believe she wouldn't at least file a report about the dead pet." I shuffled the disturbing photos of her late Yorkshire Terrier, slain and left on her back doorstep, under a few older snapshots.

"Well, we are dealing with potential blackmail, here. It could be the mistress, it could be the husband, it could be the mistress' husband. Or a combination." 

I nodded, examining an interestingly clear angle of the guilty couple mid-coitus. My stomach growled a bit. 

"Nnn…I'm still hungry. Boss, I think we should just get lunch, and think about all this when we get back." 

Although we were equal partners, financially, I called him 'Boss'. Lots of reasons; some sentimental, some not. He bossed me around – that was the most obvious reason. He had the domineering personality. He did most of the talking when clients came in. He was older. 

He also responded like Pavlov's Dog to the address, crooking his head in my direction and looking up at me, eyes fierce and dark and adoring in a way I was suspect to believe only I could discern. "Yeah, let's get some barbecue or something." 

"That new place on St. Charles delivers." 

He barely smirked. "Too lazy to get up?" 

"No," I shuffled my hair around, letting it fall naturally back into whatever order it wanted, "I just…just want to stay in." 

"Pouting," he assessed flatly, still smirking, "you're so cute." 

"Oh, you know you'd be pouting, too!" I was indignant at being called on it. 

"Heh," he showed his teeth when he smiled, this time, and I was less indignant and more charmed, "you'd think we were married, how much we argue about the quantity of sex these days." 

"If you weren't drunk by the end of dinner on our anniversary…" It was something we laughed about most days, and I used it as unexpected cannon fodder on others.

"I still gave you a blowjob." Dismissive.

"That was sloppy and you know it." Confrontational.

And so there we were. We'd been working so much, I hadn't gotten the chance to demand make-up sex. I was still waiting for it to be offered, almost two weeks after the fact.

"All right, smartass, what would you rather have for lunch, a sandwich or a fuck? Just tell me, jeez." 

Here was the other reason I called him 'Boss'. It had taken about three romps on his squeaky twin mattress for me to decide that I much preferred taking it up the ass to giving it. And Shishido, well…he gave it very well. I slouched back in my chair and splayed out, defiant and teasing at once. "Don't sound so enthused about it." 

"First you pout, now you want to play games?" He stood up and tugged at his red necktie. It was a great thing that the little details still turned me on; like the fact that he insisted on dressing like a P.I. straight out of the 50's, with sleeves rolled up, suspenders, and all. He even wore a black fedora outdoors. I loved that hat, mostly because I was so unremarkable that I could never pull off such an ensemble. 

"Lock the door," I warned him, my over-cautious tendencies rearing despite the growing hardness between my legs. He slinked out of his suspenders as he swaggered to the door and flipped the lock, and I was too distracted to even mention that he'd forgotten the 'OPEN' sign. By the time he turned around, I'd made my way to the side of the table facing him. I hopped up onto the edge, thoughtless of the photographs, and leaned forward, smiling. Shishido smiled back, stalking toward me, slipping the tie from his collar.

"Kiss me." I asked as he pushed his hands under my conservative suit jacket in a practiced move to divest me. 

"Where?" His lips lingered on my cheek. I was breathing faster, now, thrilled at the prospect of his undivided attention.

"Everywhere." I moaned like a cliché romance novel heroine, tilting my head back. He grabbed my jaw in his powerful hand and held my mouth open as he pressed our lips together. No questioning his tongue, which was just as firm and insistent as it had been five years ago. It remained one of my favorite things about him. But, I had a lot of those. 

As his hands fanned through the photos of illicit fucking and less savory things, I fell back onto the glossy bed, twisting into a not-quite-comfortable, but workable, position. My nipples reacted to the rasp of his tongue and he pushed my undershirt up as far as it would go. Despite his hard-headedness, I'd never been left wanting from Shishido as a lover. When I asked him to kiss me everywhere, he did just that. I felt the apology in his attention as he nuzzled my stomach, growling appreciatively as I kneaded my fingers in his short hair and chuckled. I absolved him of all former accusations after just one kiss to my belly-button. "Shishido…" I breathed, and he gripped my hips, kneeling in front of the table. Fingers just as sure and unyielding as everything else about him, he brushed his knuckles over my thighs as he pulled down my pants and my briefs (a fashion choice I only prescribed to because he loved watching me walk around in them). 

"Let me make up for my sloppiness." He said snidely, and I could only murmur in response, wanting to cuff him over the head but only tightening my grip on his hair. I rolled my hips up to him. Deftly, he removed my left shoe with one hand as he held my cock in the other, squeezed it gently, massaged my balls with his wet lips. Shishido gave a thorough, intense blowjob, consistent with his personality. I'd taken a minor in psychology during college, and although my actual experience was very limited, I tried to imagine what sort of a blowjob people gave based on personality. It was a nice way to distract myself during otherwise uninteresting conversations. Taka, for instance, the new bounty hunter for the bondsman we relied on for several referrals, I'd had some time to observe. He'd probably be slow, shy at first, sort of unassuming until he found his groove. He seemed the sort to finish off with an unexpected forcefulness. Now, he was attractive, to say the very least, but I couldn't imagine myself wanting anyone but Shishido. 

Already, he was pushing his fingers inside of me, slick with saliva and just as insistent as his tongue. His tongue soon followed, and I lost my breath on a sob of surprise and pleasure. He held my legs up and apart as he licked me deeply, spreading me wide, still only getting me ready. This, I thought to myself, was what our anniversary should have been. No time like the present. As far as he could slide his fingers in, now, he did, aiding the process when needed with his mouth. I cooed his name again. He took this as a signal – I appreciated that.

"My dick's so hard for you, baby." He breathed roughly, standing up between my legs, tearing his belt out of its buckle, shucking his pants, his boxers, just as far as he needed to. Shishido wasn't a poet, but his sex talk always sounded very natural, without any reserve. Me, I could barely say the word "cock" without giggling. 

So, I only responded with a hum. Professionally and socially, I always told people I wasn't really one for talking. They never knew how far that distinction carried. Talking is very different from…what I was wont to do. 

I fairly screamed when he pushed inside of me. I must have, because I always did. It was always a scream of pleasure, and it had made the first few months of living at home and having sex under our parents' noses very rough. Shishido had a style, and it had never been his style to fuck me gently or slowly. He was balls-deep in one thrust, and I still, after five years, found it hard to keep my breath. My enthusiasm only made him even more cocky (no pun intended) concerning his natural blessing, but I was there to enjoy the benefits, not feed the fire of his ego. I kept crying out, punctuating my vocal outbursts with a well-placed "fuck me," "yes," or "that's good" here and there. 

He threw one of my legs over his shoulder while I was powerless to stop him, not that I would've done anything to stop him, and I reached down to grip the edge of the table with both hands. He took this bracing as a cue to pound into me with complete abandon, and my voice started to hit notes that would have made a Castrato raise his eyebrows. As the table began to shift and make creaky sounds against the tile floor, I surrendered myself to the rhythm he adopted. My eyes shut in a flutter when I relaxed my face, and my outbursts turned breathier, less bombastic. 

We sometimes talked about taking the first vacation of our adult lives, jetting off to the Bahamas or the Virgin Islands, with all the time in the world and all the room we wanted to spread out and enjoy one another. I told him I was perfectly happy with the spirited encounters in our cramped living space, but it was a lie. Even as he fucked me on the table I was trying to place myself in a luxury cabin on some incredible cruise liner, where the furniture was bolted down and didn't try to lift off the floor with every vigorous movement. 

I squealed and arched my back as his fingers bit into my waist, signaling his orgasm. I am a firm believer that anytime you feel it's been too long since you last had sex, it's been too long. Especially in a close-quartered relationship. Perhaps that's why it felt so good, as Shishido breathed against my shoulder, rocking against me gently but still holding me tight. There was a comfort thing about it, like something I'd have forever, comfort even with my one leg still crooked awkwardly between us. A few minutes for him to recover – I'd allow him at least three before I started harping on him to finish me off, though I never usually had to worry. 

This would have been no exceptional day on that front, either – he'd have sucked me off the quick and easy way, or he'd have just stroked me while staying close and staring into my eyes. I had to be amused at his overwhelming amount of romantic tendencies despite all the posturing. But I was to experience neither of those happy endings for all my petulant efforts at getting to this point. Just as Shishido was straightening his back and running it through his head what he'd rather do, someone knocked on the door. 

Both of us contorted a little bit, and the next thing I knew I was hopping into my pants and searching for my left shoe, hard-on be damned, not that it would be sticking around for very long. Painful, that. 

"Did I leave the 'OPEN' sign on!?" Shishido hissed, trying to arrange his clothes presentably and as quickly as possible. Another knock. 

"I guess you did!" I hissed back, shooting daggers with my eyes. He rolled his, and we snorted at each other as we darted back and forth in an effort to make everything, including ourselves, look in place. I snatched up the loose photographs that had dropped to the floor, and swept the bulk of what was on the table in a large corrugated box. Shishido checked with me to see if I was presentable, and I just told him to "open the fucking door!" as sharply as possible. I made my way for the back to retrieve a mug of coffee and check myself in the mirror, leaving him to usher in whoever was obviously not going away. 

Pouting and bristling in the back, I heard him exchange small talk with our sudden, unwelcome visitor. 

"I was afraid you had gone out for lunch." 

"No…we were about to, but you caught us." He laughed half-heartedly. 

"Well, um…hey, if you want to call something in, go ahead. I don't want to keep you from eating. It's cool. Just…I really need to see someone about my case." I leaned back and peaked around the partition, intrigued by the visitor's tone. Until money exchanged hands, I wouldn't call him a client. We didn't have many walk-ins, which I suppose is why we both felt comfortable enough to have wild sex in the office in the middle of the day. The stranger – Tall, Dark, and Handsome – stood there scratching the front of his yellow t-shirt. "It sounds weird calling it a case. But I can't go to the police with it."

"Why not?" Shishido asked, and I dropped three sugar cubes into my coffee, adjusting myself between the legs before rolling my eyes and preparing to enter the scene. 

"Lots of really sensitive details. I suppose there's a client confidentiality thingy?" 

"Of course, if you want to become a client. I'm Ryou Shishido, by the way. This is my partner, Choutarou Ohtori." He pointed at me, and I probably looked like a wife sashaying into the room, the way I smiled. I felt more like a spitting viper. 

"Hello!" 

"Hey. Nice to meet you." He stood up and shook our hands. He was close to our age, by the look of him. Perhaps even younger – an oddity. "Is there a consultation, at least? Something to sort of make sure you can even do what I need you to do?" 

"Yeah, sure. What is it you need us to do?" 

"Confidentiality?" 

"Well…don't mention names." 

He looked conflicted for a minute, probably trying to sort out the way to present his situation in the most confidential manner. I'd seen it many times. I took a seat behind the proper desk and Shishido stayed at the table. Our client-to-be was sitting in the other chair, his elbows on the table where I was being fucked about eight minutes ago. 

"I think two of my friends' lives are in danger. In fact, I sort of know they are. My room-mate, he says there's been an attempt on his life." He bit his bottom lip, staring at his elbow thoughtfully. "And my coworker is in similar jeopardy." 

"Is this because of something you did, or something beyond your control?" I asked, and then sipped at my coffee. No doubt Shishido picked up on my slightly barbed tone, but I shot him a 'what?' look while Tall, Dark, and Handsome was placing his words. I was too screwed up inside to even be conjuring up what sort of blowjob he'd give. That sort of thought was too, too painful at the moment. 

"Definitely something beyond my control, but they're both involved because they have the same employer. I'll say they're prostitutes, if that helps speed this process up." He half-shrugged. 

"Well, that definitely does explain why you couldn't go to the police." I quipped weakly.

"There's a lot more, but I'm not comfortable divulging it just yet." There seemed to be a burden of much history in his tone. I was intrigued, to say the least, but one glance at Shishido showed that he was taking this far more seriously. 

"Mister…um…" Shishido fished for a name.

"Takeshi. Takeshi Momoshiro." 

"Mr. Takeshi…you have to understand why these cases are so dangerous to pursue. Private investigation isn't exactly everything it appears to be in the movies, you know." 

"Oh, I understand. It's just that my coworker was told to come to you. He can't, personally…he doesn't even want any investigation to go on, to be honest, but I've got two people to protect, and—" 

"Wait, wait, wait. He was told to come to us? By whom?" 

Takeshi Momoshiro exhaled pointedly and gave Shishido a dark glare. "His brother. His brother who is also, by all accounts, a killer."

This was getting more interesting by the minute. We didn't often deal in prostitutes, nor did we deal in murderers. Certainly the combination of the two was even rarer. Most often, prostitutes didn't have people out to "protect" them so valiantly. 

"I know it sounds crazy, but…" he gesticulated frantically, looking desperate for a moment, "I guess I can mention this without fearing any – oh, fuck confidentiality, I haven't slept in two days – in your line of work, have you ever heard of The Empire?" 

I stared at Shishido, whose emotions were effectively radiating outward in a sudden explosion of seriousness. The look on his face was enough to warrant my concern, but I felt it best not to interrupt, not with the way he was staring down our visitor, frozen in position. Only his lips moved as he said sharply: "Mr. Takeshi, consider your next words extremely carefully." What the fuck was this? I lowered my coffee mug and tilted my head in sudden shock at my partner's behavior. "Do you have reason to believe The Empire has threatened the lives of your friends?" 

"I know it for a fact." 

"You have evidence?" 

He produced a neatly folded letter from his pocket. "This is the letter my coworker's brother sent him. I can tell you his name – my friend's brother. He's a member." 

I had to speak up. Shishido was nearly crackling with electricity at this point and I had no idea why. "What in the —" 

"Choutarou." I was shushed without really being shushed. Shishido's tone was at once angry, firm, and apologetic that I had to even witness this. With only my name and an inflection, he managed to say "this is mine. I'll take care of it, and I'll tell you everything when I have time to tell it."

I withdrew my question and just rubbed my temples instead. 

"Mr. Takeshi, we can't stop The Empire." Shishido's voice faltered for a moment. I bowed my eyebrows in consideration of this. 

"I don't expect you to. I just want to know who's involved. I have my own enforcement plan." 

"Vigilante, Mr. Takeshi? That's not smart against these people." 

"I have my own enforcement plan. I just need to know who the members are in this city. I need to make sure they're dealt with before they get to my friends." 

If Shishido smoked, he'd be lighting up nervously now. He fidgeted and leaned back in the chair, his back against the wall, his legs crossed at the knee. "…tell me one thing about the person who wrote that letter." 

"One thing." 

To any outside observer, myself included, it seemed more like a negotiation than a consultation. 

"Is there reason to believe he is trying to undermine The Empire?" 

"He only wants to protect his brother. That's all. This letter was never meant to be in my hands." 

"Fuck." Shishido let the chair fall back onto all four legs, and ran a hand through his hair. 

"What's that mean?" Mr. Takeshi asked. 

"Well, it means we'll take the case, and that scares the shit out of me." 

"What if I'd said yes, he is a traitor?" 

My partner kept his eyes on his shirt as he picked pieces of lint off the fabric. His voice was even. "I'd have said you were being bullshitted. There aren't any traitors within The Empire." 

"Care if I ask how you know this?" 

"Yes. I do." Even my skin began to crawl when I heard that. "Choutarou, grab a contract, please." 

I wished he'd remembered the 'OPEN' sign, the sonofabitch. I'd say it again a month later, my words frosting in the night air, but by that point indignation and casual discomfort would have morphed into something far more sinister. I fished a contract from the file cabinet and noticed with no small amount of concern the way Shishido tensed when the drawer banged shut with a metallic boom.


	6. Gakuto

It reminded me of a subway tunnel, in shape and size. I'd been running in the thing for about an hour – my voice had already gone hoarse. I didn't even know what I was yelling, anymore. It was all muffled, like I was underwater, like I was hearing myself from the other side of the tunnel, wherever that was. I certainly wasn't finding it. It wasn't a subway tunnel, though – no tracks, no lights, no sign of life. There was a drip, drip, drip sound everywhere I went, and maybe it was all in my head but I could swear that over the splashing of my feet in the stagnant water I'd heard the dripping get faster over an hour. Just subtly enough to seem a trick of the subconscious. I couldn't run anymore, so I flung myself at one of the curved walls, and found it to be smooth – perfectly smooth, not a nook or a ridge to sink my nails into. I couldn't try and claw my way out before this thing closed in on me. Yes, I realized, as I scraped at the porcelain steel surface anyway, the drip was getting faster. I balled my fist (one of my fingernails had bent back, and the quick was bleeding) and slammed it against the wall in desperation, in anger, in fear. It made a clanging sound, much to my surprise, like there was nothing surrounding me but an infinite hollow. The echo was chilling and it made my heart twist up in anxiety. I backed up and started to run again.   
  
By the time the water was up to my chest and the rain was falling in sheets, blocking my vision at a hairsbreadth, I started awake.   
  
Yuushi was there to glare down at me, and to provide his simple analysis of the situation: "You're going to a doctor."   
  
I was barely coherent. I sat up a little on the couch, between his knees, but I couldn't hold myself up and just flopped back down across them. "Everyone has nightmares."   
  
"Not to this point. You can't sleep. They're affecting you physically. See, you're sweating again. Maybe you need Ambien or something." He was concerned, in a stern but doting way that I'd grown accustomed to. I allowed him to wipe at my face with the sleeve of his shirt, but I didn't respond to the Ambien comment.   
  
"I don't  _want_  any medication."   
  
"Would you just try it, maybe?" He lowered his voice to something vaguely sweet and humbled, which he knew always broke me down.   
  
"If you can get me some without going to a doctor, yeah, I'll see how it works out. But think about it. 'Is there any stress in your life that might be leading to these nightmares?' 'Why, yes, doctor, all my colleagues are being murdered!'…you can see where the line of questioning would go." I made what he called an "eyebrows-face" at him, and he relented with a scoff.   
  
I noted that it must have been laundry day – he had his hair pulled back and he was wearing an old university sweater. By the time I registered the smell of fresh sheets, he was unfurling one of them and doing a bang-up job of folding it over my head and shoulders. "Not  _all_  our colleagues – Sakaki and Hiyoshi, that's all."   
  
"Still. It sucks."   
  
"Do you think it might have anything to do with your audition coming up? If you're up, help me fold these."   
  
Always with the sheets. And always with that tone of voice when he talked about my dancing. "It's an important audition!"   
  
"You know I want you to be able to dance, but…"   
  
I was already somewhere between growling and sighing, under my breath, as I grabbed a sheet and started to sit up. I didn't like to fall back on youth, but I whined. "It's such a great opportunity, Yuushi!"   
  
"It's a  _television show._ "   
  
"We're really really fucking good."  
  
"I'm sure you all are. And I'm sure everyone on television has skeletons in their closets, but  _killing and eating people_  is a pretty god-damned big skeleton. Reality, Gakuto, reality. We already live in a dream world. I could spout off a lot of hackneyed adages but you get my point. "   
  
I couldn't really argue with that. Which isn't to say I couldn't have  _tried_ , but my constitution was weak at that moment. I crossed my legs up on the cushion and kept folding. The fever from my dream was breaking, as it always did after a few minutes. I tried to weigh the exhilaration I got from dancing against the euphoric desire that had overtaken me when I first had the uncontrollable urge to sink my teeth into Yuushi's thigh – and did it. That didn't happen again, but it had been the catalyst for a whole new chapter in our life together. Pillow confessions became more lurid and then made their way into the Lab. He'd always sort of liked the taste of blood, he said. I just liked biting soft, unguarded flesh, as hard as I could. I didn't like breaking skin that way, not at first, but it evolved to that. The first time I tore off a good chunk of skin and spat it out to leave my lips and chin all bloody, well…I'd never seen Oshitari Yuushi lose his composure like that. I was suddenly the one being attacked, but it was a very good thing. By the end of things I'd come twice, realized I liked the taste of blood, too, and we'd kept our unfortunate spectator alive for the entire revelation. At that point I was still a few months away from my culinary endeavors, but to say things started to get more interesting long before that is an understatement.   
  
"You want me to give up the audition. Drop out."   
  
"I  _want_  you to keep dancing, but I want you to come to terms with the fact that you're not going to be famous for it. You could be…but you can't be. I'm sorry." And he was. I could hear it. Didn't stop me from being indignant, that.   
  
"It's not the audition, anyway. I don't want to die. Two nights ago I dreamed that crows were pecking out my eyes while I was being cut up by these…strings…wrapped all around me…they're just  _weird_  dreams. Don't people usually dream about…not…crows pecking out their eyeballs when they just have performance anxiety?"  
  
He almost smiled. "Did you know Hiyoshi?" The sheet he pulled from the basket was one with a lingering rust-colored ring on it where we'd never quite gotten the blood out. Expensive cotton, that's why. We started buying cheap sheets after that, for everywhere but the bedroom. Our bedroom, to be precise. Sometimes, with the size of the house we shared, I expected to wander into rooms I'd never known existed before. He assured me that Atobe Keigo's house was even bigger. I never justified those remarks with a reply. I wanted to shove Atobe Keigo into a cremator and slam the door. No work, no fun, no artful death for him. Especially now that he was talking up my partner again and Yuushi had no idea how to delete Messenger logs.   
  
"Not that well. He didn't seem very social to me. Was he?"   
  
"Social? Not at all. I didn't know him that well, either, though."   
  
Yuushi lowered the half-folded sheet and pretended to watch a little bit of the Discovery Channel program that happened to be on. He must have hijacked the television – I had fallen asleep watching 'High School Musical'. Again. A bland announcer was saying something about bridges.   
  
"Did Mizuki…tell you how he died? Does he know?"   
  
"Of course not the details. No one was there." Yuushi adjusted his glasses and looked over at me. "Are you sure you want to know what I know? These nightmares…"   
  
"I kill and eat people."   
  
"Fair enough," he sighed. One shoulder of his university sweater shifted and exposed his clavicle neatly. I eyed it, trying to focus on it as he talked, knowing the shape and flavor and texture of that area from so many explorations. A comfort zone. Something that would be there every time I woke up… "Just like Sakaki, it wasn't a really creative thing, but it was methodical. You can tell whoever did it enjoyed it."   
  
"Wait, weren't you saying Tezuka did this?" I only knew stories about Tezuka. Mostly because they had to do with Atobe Keigo and I always found myself rooting for the one who was supposed to be our 'bad guy'. Sometimes, though, I got the feeling that Yuushi felt the same way. Those times, I even cracked a smile during the stories. Which was something you simply did not do.   
  
"No, not Tezuka himself. He wouldn't." He said that with such conviction, like he knew. Like he was saying something about Tezuka that bordered on respectful. I didn't dwell on it too far past a curious tilt of my head. "Remember when we were on the phone with Mizuki? You had to conference in on your cell because the other phone went dead? Were you even  _listening_  to that conversation? Anyway, like we were saying then, it must be one of his boys. Sakaki would have recognized him on his own, and so would have Hiyoshi. End of that theory. Besides, Tezuka's not a killer."   
  
"Just a whooooore…"   
  
"Hey," he shoved me just enough that it made me chuckle, and I rolled my eyes, "when he was a whore you were still playing junior varsity soccer."   
  
"Care to make me feel a little lower?" I happened to be quite sensitive regarding my age. It didn't help that I looked about three years younger than that, and had the body of a female gymnast (height and all). I mumbled down at the random pillow case that had shown up in the basket while I was rooting for something less challenging to fold. "Next you'll be telling me you fucked him."   
  
"Maybe I did." But I knew that inflection of his. He wasn't a good bluffer. Yuushi wanted people to always be very well aware of how expertly they were being played – his subtlety was very well-showcased, if that adds up.   
  
"Did  _not_." It was my turn to shove, and he barely rocked, taking the entire force of it in his hips where he sat. A few deep, staccato chuckles in his throat, and he sighed.   
  
"Too far off-topic. You're feeling a little better?" I nodded. "Good. Whoever's done these killings is damned precise. Can't be sure if Tezuka hired someone, but it's unlikely. If we know one thing from Sakaki, it's that he rented as young as he could find them, and if we knew one thing about Hiyoshi it was that he knew anyone who had ever done business in this town…in our field, at least. So…"   
  
"So Tezuka has some sort of secret weapon? Sounds…far-fetched."   
  
"So do we. So does how we met."   
  
"Hm. Granted. So—" I was going to ask something about the details of the murders, even though my subconscious probably would have protested viciously the next time I closed my eyes. I tried not to think about crows. But I was interrupted by what I first thought was the loud, obnoxious grandfather clock in the antechamber. I knew within the first moment that it wasn't, though – the sound was too mechanical. "What the Hell, is someone at the  _door?_ " I hopped in the cushion and turned around, flinging my arms over the back of the couch.   
  
Yuushi and I sat in silence when the bell rang again. "Maybe it's Family."   
  
That's how we referred to each other, all of us. You could almost hear the capital F when you heard a member of The Empire say it, too. Made it easy to talk business in public, meet new people. "Gakuto, this is Sanada, he's Family from the Heights. Oh, yes, waiter, we'll have the salad bar." Easy stuff. Still, the way Yuushi said it now made it seem like he was grasping for something, like there wasn't any Family beyond the two of us. For all we knew, there may not have been. I was in a tunnel and there was a hollow all around me. When he stood up to go for the door, my hand darted out for the hem of his sweater. I withdrew it quickly, but he caught my moment of nervousness.   
  
"Everything's fine." He assured me with an easy, fluid tone, and bent in to kiss me. I held onto the ends of his hair when he pulled away, not because I didn't really want him to walk to the door, and not because I was really so scared as I seemed. It was because his kiss reminded me how long it had been. I kissed him every morning, every night, as much as I'd ever wanted to. But one of the most important things was missing. The blackout on The Empire was putting its strain on me in different ways. Classic Catch-22. What I needed to relieve the stress of the threat we faced was exactly the thing that would bring the threat into our home. I wanted to taste blood on Yuushi's lips, I wanted to feel it on his fingers. I wanted bruising sex on the floor of the Lab and the sort of hard-on I could only get from tearing a jaw off. Being selfish was just in my nature, I guess. Every forensic expert will tell you that killers – people like me, people like Yuushi – develop an addiction to killing, but you never know unless you've been there. I didn't need a sleeping pill and I didn't necessarily need to know I wasn't going to be knifed by someone. I needed to carve away the smooth, beautiful flesh of someone's abdomen. I  _needed_  to watch Yuushi with a bone saw or an oscillating blade. And sometimes a blood vessel would pop or an artery would be cut, and the spray would hit his face. I  _needed_  it. When you've actually had someone pound your ass over the broadside of a corpse, you're too far gone to ever be normal. He was right. What business did I have putting my face out there? I wondered how I'd break the news to my crew…  
  
"Did you call anyone?"   
  
I was perplexed, and I'm sure I pulled another patented face of mine, because he was already rolling his eyes before I spoke. "I've been asleep."   
  
"I mean before. Did you book us someone? You know, we were supposed to cancel everything.'   
  
"Yeah. I know!" I vaulted over the back of the couch and came up to him in the doorway to the foyer. "I didn't book anything. I'm not stupid." He looked unconvinced. "I'm  _not!_  Oh, fuck you. Who's there, anyway?"   
  
I leaned forward until the door was in my line of site, and noticed it was raining outside. Again. Most of the time I'd hear the rain on the windows, or on the roof of our bedroom on the second floor, but I'd been in the living room most of the evening. The smell of the cold rain wafted in. It was getting chillier, now. Unseasonably so. The boy on our porch didn't seem so concerned, wearing only a black hoodie against the elements and carrying an umbrella. He was shaking it out but not stepping inside. He looked even younger than I did, but without the gymnast's body. As I was examining him, he looked up and noticed. I flicked my head in a gesture of pure judgment and then pulled back to whisper at Yuushi. "What did he say to you?"   
  
"That he was sent by Tezuka."   
  
We shared the same thought, the same expression, the same headspace for a moment. We'd always been rather adept at that. Wavelengths, I always said.  _Rapport_ , he called it. I preferred my word, but he sounded damned sexy saying  _rapport_. "So is this it?"  
  
"What do you mean by that?" He whispered back.  
  
"Our chance. Is this our chance to get him before he gets us?"   
  
Yuushi glanced over his shoulder and gestured the boy inside, finally. My heart started to thump, and I felt a rush of so many things, I couldn't begin to sort them out and know them all uniquely.  _We are the first to know so much, now that two of ours are dead_ , I thought, and it was almost as if Yuushi were listening as we watched our visitor shed his cap, his hoodie, and hang his umbrella up with them.  _It's not like he's that intimidating…is this actually the killer? This kid?_  
  
"Gakuto?"   
  
"Ah?"   
  
"Would you please show our guest inside?" Yuushi breezed away, off to make himself presentable, not that I wouldn't devour him in laundry day clothes just as easily. He'd also turn on the hot water in the Lab and make sure everything was in order. My dear, talented Yuushi…it always depended on his mood, what sort of tricks he'd pull. I took another long look at the night's playmate and sized him up to my best abilities.   
  
I wanted to stick a butcher knife through the center of his chest. Continental style, right through the sternum. I'd done it before, practiced. I had the force for it, now. Just leave the knife there, wait for the hemorrhage, and then –   
  
"What's your name?" I asked, smiling at my fantasy and also at his lips.   
  
"Ryoma." He answered with a voice so unexpectedly deep and monotone it took me a moment to realize he'd even spoken.   
  
Or maybe we'd do it Yuushi's way. He liked to work them over from the back. It was artful, so see him flay someone alive, and it was always something best done from the back. I touched him between the shoulder blades and hoped he didn't have any scars, or any tattoos. We both liked a pristine canvas.  
  
"I'm Gakuto. We haven't had company in a while, so…I'm sorry we seemed inhospitable."   
  
"No, you're not."  
  
I laughed at his nerve because I found myself admiring it. "You're right, I'm not."   
  
"Your partner is Oshitari Yuushi, right?"   
  
"My lover, yes." I added a twinge of possessiveness to my tone, along with the expected haughtiness.   
  
"Okay."   
  
He was strange. I couldn't see much meat on him, which didn't mean by any means that it wasn't there. Flanks, steaks, a roast – there would be something. And what a prize it would be, to feast on the one who dared to bring us down, to drink his blood, sap his power. My own loyalty to The Empire ran deeper than my arrogance let on – I wanted this for more than selfish reasons. The glory, of course, would be there. But I'd feel like I finally gave something back. Most importantly, I'd finally have a leg up on that bastard Atobe Keigo.   
  
I circled Ryoma and leaned closer, smelling the rain on his skin and the superficial scent of his body. That scent meant nothing, really, but foreplay is necessary in any encounter, psychological or sexual or both. "Aren't you wondering why we brought you in even though we weren't expecting you?"   
  
"Not especially." He was impassive to my advances, and so I decided to be hastier than usual. I ran the back of one hand over his arm, watching him as he talked. He had a strong jaw. Not strong enough, I was sure. "For someone who lives with his lover, you seem awfully starved for physicality."   
  
"That's just not true. Well…the physicality part." I chuckled airily at my own private joke, and pulled him forward against me. My hands cupped his ass, which was hidden by the style of clothing he wore but felt quite full for a boy his size. Yuushi would be pleased. For my part, it was nice to have someone I didn't have to look up at, for once. I opened my eyes as wide as they could go and resisted the almost painful urge to sink my teeth into his lip immediately.   
  
"Gakkun." Yuushi's voice entered me like a tranquilizer and flooded up and into my brain stem. I melted away from Ryoma with a steady gaze. When I turned around on a half-spin, I nearly crashed into Yuushi's chest. There was the height difference again – my lips level with his collarbone, my comfort spot. I made up for the almost-fumble by tossing myself around him, leaning into his body, purring. He could tell I was content, and, beyond that, excited. Underneath the impenetrable façade, I knew Yuushi had a heart about as stony as a bowl of pudding. Things Atobe Keigo just couldn't figure out. Things I didn't manipulate, but rather nurtured in my own way. I didn’t want too many people to know the things he said to me in confidence while my head was on his bare chest, or the undercurrent of tenderness that grounded me when he locked a strong arm around me and told Ryoma to "go to the third room down the hall, on the right. Please wait for us, we'll be right in."   
  
"Okay."  
  
The Lab had a false front, a little sitting room with a door that was reinforced from the inside, a trap enclosure that could be locked down within a moment's notice from the Lab itself, if anyone tried to escape (which they had, before). The woman who'd built it for Yuushi used to design panic rooms in Metro SoCal, and I'd say in sheer shock value alone, the investment had already been more than returned. To anyone who didn't know how the sort of thing worked, though…it was just an average sitting room.   
  
"Shouldn't we follow him?" I whispered, on my tiptoes and close to Yuushi's ear as Ryoma padded down the hall with his hands in his pockets. "He's dangerous."   
  
"We're dangerous."   
  
"Don't get proud. What did you tell everyone else, after Taki got arrested? Don't get proud. As good as it looks on you, it does nothing for getting what we want."   
  
"What do we want, Gakuto?" He held my face, stroked the shadow of my cheekbones with his broad thumbs. His lips were the slightest bit pursed. What I wanted in that moment is where I diverged from a good 99.9% of the population.   
  
"Tie him down, cut him slowly, gouge out his eyes. Get a bucketful of his blood, Yuushi. A bucketful."   
  
"And what will you use that for? Work or pleasure?"   
  
"Maybe both. I haven't decided." Though marinating meat in spiced blood  _did_  tend to give it a bit more of an exotic flavor. My breath was shallow, now, and I wanted to get my hands around a knife as soon as possible. "Front or back? I can't decide."   
  
"What do you mean? How I should fuck you in there?"   
  
"That's an easy one – both. I mean for  _him_. I want to put a knife through his chest, Yuushi. But I want you to skin him, too."   
  
"From behind?"   
  
"He's got such a nice ass. I felt it out for you."   
  
"Well…" It came down to which of us would treat the other to the prize. We each got off on watching the other work, true. But doing the work was satisfying on a whole other level. There was also the bonus pride that came from relating each episode to the other Empire members, and that was just for regular victims. I imagined talking about how we brought down The Empire's most wanted, and the rush it would be. I wanted to be in the Lab already.  
  
I sprinted ahead of Yuushi by a few paces, and channeled my excitement into a cartwheel between the bathroom door and the library. I popped out of the landing with my elbows crooked above my head, and Yuushi scooped my skinny waist into his arms with a smiling moan. "I want to bite his lip off." I said, wide-eyed.   
  
He let me into the Lab first and whispered at me to pick out a knife. I stared down at Ryoma as haughtily as I could when I walked past, through the heavy velvet curtain and into the stark white room beyond. It would have been foolish to even assume our guest hadn't peeked, hadn't scouted the place already. Everything seemed to be intact, though, not an instrument of agony taken from its designated spot. The hot water was running noiselessly in the big steel tub sink in the corner. I hummed as I slid a few of the larger knives out of their slots, examined them, tested them for weight and balance. Finally I chose the one I'd practiced on – it made a great sound as I ran the blade flat backwards across my arm, smiling. The handle was just as heavy as the blade itself, which was long and perfectly sculpted. I lost myself in it for a bit, in the stainless steel reflection, in the little brand stamp near the hilt. A dramatic sweep for maximum penetration, with a Mokume guard and a short choil. It reminded me too much of Yuushi's cock. Yes, this would do. I ran it under the steaming water in reverent silence, and was pressing my tongue to the hot width of the metal when Yuushi came in. He was in a hurry.  
  
"What did you do?" I asked, wondering why Ryoma wasn't resisting, and seemed to be rather limp in his arms.  
  
"Blood choke. I don't feel like a struggle to get him in here, nor did I feel like drugging him up. Quick." He would regain consciousness within moments, I knew that much. I left the knife on the aluminum countertop and helped restrain his left arm while Yuushi took care of his right. He was already coming around by the time I was tightening the leather band on his wrist.   
  
Yuushi clapped his cheeks. "Wake up." He said firmly, and stepped back. He'd changed into a navy blue sweater and a dark pair of jeans, while I was still wearing the Hollister t-shirt I'd slipped on that morning. I didn't want to stain it, true, but it wasn't like ash grey Hollister shirts were limited edition or anything.  
  
I gripped my knife again, and watched Ryoma struggling a little bit while he watched us. His face was still dark, impassive. It was starting to piss me off. My new goal became bringing some life to his eyes before gouging them out. I wanted to see him terrified, I wanted to see him in pain.   
  
"Yuushi."   
  
"Yeah." He flipped out his butterfly knife and, in a swift move that took my breath away, a few tiny drops of blood went with the slash of his blade across the top of Ryoma's cheek, on his lower eyelid. He clenched his eye shut tightly, and finally cringed. Scraping the edge of the knife along the fabric of my jeans, I giggled sadistically. I'd not really known where Yuushi would make his first incision, but I wasn't displeased with this turn of events.   
  
"I hope it hurts," he said flatly, turning his back on Ryoma, who appeared to be weeping tears of blood at this point. It was dripping on the floor. "Killing you outright would have been easy, but we decided to enjoy this. Don't you admit it's sort of sloppy, just showing up the way you did?"   
  
"Yuushi!" I whined a bit.   
  
"I've got it." He held up a white plastic bucket for my approval, and slid it under the headrest to catch what little we could for the time being.   
  
"You don't get it at all." Even with a voice heavy from pain, Ryoma somehow commanded the room. I took umbrage, and jumped up on the table before he could go on. I planted my feet on either side of his waist and crouched over him, tearing at him with my eyes where I couldn't quite bring myself to tear with my teeth yet.   
  
"What's that supposed to mean? Brat. You're just an amateur."   
  
"You're missing the most important point, here: to win."   
  
Yuushi scoffed behind me. "Oh. We'll win. Doesn't that seem a bit apparent?"   
  
"This may be good enough for most, but you've made mistakes."   
  
"Yuushi…" He was starting to scare me, the way he was looking at me. The way he was talking. The fact that I knew that tone of voice. In a strange sort of way, it reminded me of Atobe Keigo. I'm sure that was just a coincidence, a trick of my subconscious. The romance was bleeding from the room faster than any wound. I was edgy for the first time in as long as I could remember.  
  
"What's the opposite of invincible?"   
  
"Shut up!" I shouted at him, and held up my knife. I forgot to point it Continental style. I was too distracted.   
  
"Gakuto. Calm down," Even Yuushi sounded less collected than usual. Something about this kid, something beyond everything we could see and hear, was effecting us, "take a deep breath, Gakuto, it's okay."   
  
I tried to take a deep breath, but I couldn't. I felt like I was drowning. I couldn't look away from Ryoma's eyes.   
  
"It's "vincible". But no one uses that word. Most people would try to find another word. Do you know why? Vincible is indistinguishable. You don't hear a different word. No one says it, so its meaning has bled into its antonym. Everyone looks for another word. Conquerable. Fallible. Prone. I'd call you…vulnerable."   
  
My heart was pounding. I couldn't feel my ears. I could hardly feel my fingers gripping the blade. More to the point, I still couldn't look away from his eyes, one bloodied and the other perplexingly deep. I did find the capacity to squeeze my own shut and to whine out a muted, helpless sort of noise. The kind of noise I made in the best moments of lovemaking, but with a completely different vibration behind it, now.  
  
"Pathetic." He acknowledged me with less than a whisper.   
  
I tried to bring the blade down, but suddenly couldn’t.   
  
"Mistake: you didn't restrain my ankles. I didn't expect you to." My arms had been up and above my head. His legs had come up and around me. I lost my balance as the heels of his sneakers dug into my throat, pushing me back while keeping me centered as my lower body lost control of itself. I dropped the knife and heard it clang to the floor. A couple of seconds must have passed before Yuushi came to my aid, but I was already struggling free on my own. We didn't speak, didn't need to. We looked into each others' eyes and noticed a shared fear. It was time to end this. Fuck glory.   
  
We hadn't been listening to Ryoma, whose voice was still so deep and nondescript that it melted in with the acoustics of the room. "…it wasn't for all of that, you may have noticed the razor in my left hand."   
  
I turned my head just in time to feel my right side go numb, to hear a noise like crushed ice inside of my own head. I'd been punched before. But never like this. Once I struggled to my feet, holding the side of my face, I noticed the blood, and felt all the pain at once. Whatever blade he'd hidden up his sleeve and used to cut away at the band, he'd also used to cut into my cheek with the full force of a hook blow. I lost some equilibrium, and everything sounded off by a few seconds. Unbalanced. Distorted. I bent down, not quite aware of what was happening, and got my fuzzy-feeling fingers around the walnut grip of my knife. I swayed a little bit. Those million thoughts were running through my head again. Was I permanently injured? Where was Yuushi? Why couldn't I hear out of my right ear? Oh god, would I dance again? Would I ever dance again? Where was Yuushi? How did we get so careless? I told us not to get careless, not to get too proud. Why couldn't it have just been like I imagined it? It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. Fucking brat. Fucking  _brat!_  Where was Yuushi? Goddamnit.  _Goddamnit._  
  
"Yu-…" it hurt to speak. In a moment that felt like a fall down the rabbit hole, I spun out of my own head and toppled, but a familiar arm was there to catch me.  
  
 _"You have to run. Now."_  I nodded, coughing, getting some blood on Yuushi's hair when I did. Split-seconds were all we seemed to have, and they were all I could process. You know those stylish movies where everything is happening in flashes and blurs and about ten layers of noise, and then everything pauses for just a blink, and you feel all motion sick? Like living in the slow-motion moment of a car crash. That's what it was like, that's exactly what it was like. I tried to nod. I kept reeling. "Baby. Baby!  _Gakuto! Fuck!"_    
  
We were in the sitting room. I jerked back to consciousness and allowed Yuushi to drag me as I fell behind, and to my knees. I tried to nod again. It was about this point that I realized I had a knife in my back – not my knife, but another knife, a smaller knife. I didn't have time to worry about it. I thought about getting away from here, about having Yuushi nurse me back to health, because he'd be good at that. I thought no, I can't die, because what the Hell will be my fate if I do? I felt remorse if I stepped on a spider, but absolutely nothing but joy at slicing open another human being's stomach. There was a special place for people like me. I didn't want to go there.   
  
 _Damnit_ , I suddenly realized, and not more than ten seconds could have passed in the eternity since I got punched and stabbed, _it's the tunnel. Now I'll never get out of the tunnel, and I'll never wake up and kiss Yuushi's collarbone until I feel safe again, I'll never—_  
  
"Gakuto!"   
  
My forehead hit the floor. The numbness had spread from my face to my spine, and that effectively shut off my legs. I vaguely knew how these things worked. I could still feel my arms, though, my hand. I gripped Yuushi's fingers as tightly as I could. I saw the blur of light around him. We were in the hallway. Were we in the hallway?   
  
No.  
  
Not both of us.   
  
     _"It's an industrial steel door. Closes with enough pressure to sever a limb. It's the sort they have in the CDC, at airports."  
  
    "Seems like something out of a sci-fi movie."   
  
    "It sort of is." _  
  
As sure as I'd been that leaving Ryoma in the sitting room had been a terrible idea, and as sure as I'd been that he'd cased the Lab before we arrived, I'd never even considered that he knew what he was doing. A boy who'd killed Dr. Sakaki, a boy who'd killed Hiyoshi, and I hadn't given him any credit. A boy trusted by Kunimitsu Tezuka, who was nothing if not a legendary foil to The Empire, and I'd let my guard down. I had to make a choice. It seemed like I couldn't feel anything but my hand in Yuushi's, as he dragged me. I wasn't even an elbow to the carpet line of the hallway when I heard the engines rev up in the doorjamb. The decision was mine to make in less than three seconds.   
  
 _"Gakuto!"_  
  
…so that's the sort of scream you hear when you're about to die in front of someone's eyes and they can't do a damned thing to help you.  
  
I couldn't bang back, and this is how the nightmare would change. I'd hear him slamming his fist into that steel forever, and I'd try to signal back. Useless. Cut off from the only thing that had ever mattered, the only person who'd ever understood. And I'd made that decision. The only thing I would hear was the clanging metal, and the only thing I'd feel was my own muscles wrenching my fingers from his, pushing him away with what little strength I had.   
  
My face. I couldn't distinguish the tears, the mucus, and the blood, and so I just tried to forget what I must have looked like. I propped myself up, using my shoulders as leverage, and faced the door of the Lab. I could see Ryoma in silhouette. I managed a gut-deep chuckle of fear, of resignation. In my jostling I'd dislodged the knife. The blade wasn't even as long as my hand, but it must have gone right through a crucial artery, a nerve bundle…maybe it nicked my spinal cord. I wasn't an anatomy student. I had no idea. I was losing function, though, and I didn't want Ryoma to have any satisfaction from this whatsoever.  
  
"Pathetic." He said again, just standing there, looking down on me.  
  
I did exactly what I'd never wanted any victim to ever do to me, and I focused on what calming memories I could muster up as I dragged the blade into the groove between my jaw and my jugular, and around to the opposite end. That I had the fortitude to do so is what I considered my final victory.


	7. Two Citizens

~ MIZUKI ~  
  
"One of the Blood Emperors has been slaughtered, and the other is at large. If this were a game and I were laying wagers, I'd never have expected Oshitari's name to be in the same sentence as 'presumed dead', but here we are. The Blood Emperors having been The Empire's Dauphins after this gratuitously auspicious stretch of weeks, my hand is forced. A new successor must be agreed upon, should I myself fall. Membership declining as it is thanks to circumstances, I'd extended the invitation to this classified meeting to The Heights. Sanada, on behalf of Yukimura, who is obviously not on speaking terms with our "unforgivably careless" organization, declined to attend. It had been my every intention, as it was Sakaki's during his reign as High Emperor, to appoint Yukimura's and Sanada's payroll as fully qualified and protected members of The Empire. Obviously, they don't want that."   
  
I paused, closed my eyes, and brushed a dark curl away from my eyes.   
  
"We need power. We need intelligence. We need talent, yes, but we do not need fools."   
  
I was becoming irritated, hoping that door would open after forty-five minutes and a sparse turn-out. My voice turned flat and I mumbled out, "I leave the floor open for nominations of successor to the High Emperor."   
  
No one spoke. The entire room was fidgety, and there is nothing more pathetic than a room full of fidgety serial killers as frightened as newborn kittens. The only one who would meet my eyes was Fuji, but I never liked looking at him. He always watched me too closely during meetings, opening those terrible eyes of his just enough that I could feel their burn all the way to the back of my skull. Of course he was cordial and would never come right out to threaten my life for fucking his brother while he couldn't, but I wondered how much of that was killer's instinct barely suppressed and how much was respect toward me as High Emperor.   
  
I tossed my hair back, though I hardly expected it to behave. The marble-top table stretched and curved out in front of me, seating only a handful of my subjects. I sighed with a subdued dispassion. "No one? No suggestions? If left to my own devices—"   
  
The door finally opened, and I was partially disappointed that Atobe entered looking the same as he ever did. Flights of fancy had led me to believe he'd have dissolved into disheveled hermit mode by now. Flights of fancy and personal wishes often go hand-in-hand, what can I say?   
  
"The Ice Emperor arrives. I trust you had no trouble locating the meeting, Keigo?"   
  
I could see him narrow his eyes at me from across the room. His Hermes coat with the Kelly Birkin strap matched what I could identify as a pair of Gucci boots, but the exact style escaped me. It's not that I wasn't dressed just as impeccably, but I hadn't had the bonus of being fashionably late to add to my presence. He was scowling, but I always imagined him as doing that. Immediately, Atobe turned the heads and sucked all the energy to him. It didn't look particularly like he wanted it, for the first time since I'd known him, but it didn't stop me from being jealous.   
  
"Not at all,  _Hajime_. Please continue, don't allow me to interrupt."   
  
"I do hope the locale doesn't bring back any unpleasant memories…especially in the wake of the disappearance of your good friend Oshitari." He was pulling off his gloves and stopped, eyeing me shrewdly. I saw it flicker over his features for just a moment – cognition, dignity given to my attempt at debasing him. Then, it was gone. But it was enough.   
  
"Get on with whatever was so damned important we needed to all risk our asses to be here, Mizuki. Can I get some wine, please?" He ushered the servant of the house, which had been standing empty since Sakaki's death but remained a fabulous place to do clandestine business and ruffle Atobe's proud little feathers. Even though this was a subtly weathered version of Atobe…I supposed the situation was taking its toll on us all. Atobe took weathering like platinum took a patina, though…too many people damned him on a daily basis for my efforts to do any good, but I had to admire his arrogant brand of grace.  
  
"Whoever takes on the designation of Dauphin must understand the reality that he or she may very well be the next target. Considering most carefully the widely-accepted theory that we are battling a mole within The Empire. One of you in this room, it is in the minds of many of us, is a mortal traitor, and as such if we were to uncover your identity there would be no hesitation in hauling you onto this slab and cutting out your still-beating heart to feast upon it. We've done such to traitors before, for the smallest of infractions. This being the largest security breach in The Empire's long history, rest uneasy knowing you will be hunted until the end of your days."  
  
"Unless we're all dead." Fuji spoke up smoothly, and the sound made my jaw tighten.   
  
"Then the traitor would be dead too, ah?" Atobe sipped his wine and affected boredom as heavy-handedly as a community theater has-been.   
  
I paused. "Submitting a nomination for Atobe Keigo, Ice Emperor, to assume the role of Dauphin as left vacant by the late Blood Emperors."   
  
I watched not for Atobe's particular reaction, but to see if he would react to my sudden insistence that Oshitari was dead. He lifted his chin and the expected eyebrow, but no particular warning flags.   
  
"I second the nomination." Fuji chimed in all-too-eagerly.   
  
"Thirded." Aoi Hanamura, wearing the ridiculously huge engagement ring of Sanada Genichirou while still butchering at least three drugged-up vagrant boys a week, would probably have gone with whatever Fuji said. It's not that she didn't have an opinion of her own – in fact, her opinions sometimes bordered on certifiable. But, being certifiable myself, I could see past all that and recognize that she simply adored Fuji's work and wanted in his good graces long enough to have one of her "masterpieces" photographed by our resident  _artiste_.  
  
The wait seemed to drag on forever, as all eyes turned to Atobe and he just went about finishing his wine in one long gulp. He managed to do so with prim decorum, and replaced the crystal glass on the table lightly before he responded to the nomination and subsequent election.   
  
"You take over, Mizuki... You take over and you show no regard for the tenets and traditions that Sakaki held in place for so long. Empire Elder takes the line of succession to the throne, you know that. Fuji's been at this years longer than I have – years longer than Oshitari or Gakuto. I suspect in my heart, which still functions to the disbelief of many, that you may be the very traitor whom we should be hauling onto this slab. Oshitari would have appreciated that meeting. He always hated you."   
  
"Sedition." I choked on the word, mostly because his sheer  _calm_  was unlike anything I'd ever seen from him. Something was happening with Atobe, all right, but something as simple as "weathering" didn't seem to cover it.   
  
"Perhaps, but audacity deserves to be called out. We've all made mistakes during our lives with The Empire, Mizuki. Anyone here has a story to tell. But for you to have the sheer nerve to invite me to this house – which is not, as you might have led everyone to believe, an unknown sanctuary for our crises – is inexcusable. Beyond that and on a point that Sakaki himself would have argued until you'd wished you'd never been born, it's gauche. You don't remind a man of his pitfalls at a time like this. If you want to offer me, even foist upon me, the honor of serving as Dauphin of The Empire, I gladly accept. But if you want to serve a death threat, there are few less subtle ways."   
  
I couldn't even chuckle before he was going on, rising from his chair, pacing the table's end and swiping the dark marble with his fingertips. "As Dauphin my first official act is the call for a vote of No Confidence in the current High Emperor."  
  
I fixed my eyes on him, and he raised that same eyebrow, cocked his chin in that same way. His fingers drummed the rim of the table. "It is in my power to usurp you if evidence supports you as being a traitor or a coward or a simple disgrace to The Empire, ah?"   
  
"The vote must be unanimous, Atobe. Impossible that everyone here is as sensationalist as you." I barely found the self-assurance to muster up those words, although as I spoke them out loud I turned to believing them. I had no other choice. It just made  _sense_. The facts were in my favor – a unanimous vote of No Confidence was unlikely.   
  
I'd not counted on an oratory. Atobe leaned forward on the table, then, palms down on the cold stone, royal blue eyes open and glaring at me. He was not hurried through what were obviously prepared lines, but he was stolid, and monotone beyond that. It set me ill at ease and I'm sure I wasn't alone in that feeling. "The first victim within The Empire, High Emperor Sakaki. You were Dauphin since the position was created, and the position was created on the belief of Dr. Sakaki himself that we are, though better than humans, not immortal. He believed in order and fealty to protect all of us. He did not believe we're simply playing dress-up in a secret society. You were Dauphin because the fairest way to choose an heir to any position is by seniority and experience. Hajime Mizuki…perhaps most disturbed of us all…you've never gotten your hands dirty on your own turf. You select two victims, you give them reign of your home, you tell them the one who survives will go free. I can't deny that you run an excellent recruiting service for The Empire in doing this, but your discoveries rarely have staying power. Any present company excluded. You've been doing this since you were in school, and you would incite your own classmates to fight to see who was strongest, most capable, most passionate. Are you appreciating all of this? Hard data, Mizuki, will that now give my seditious argument a bit of weight?"  
  
Of course, I wasn't allowed to respond.   
  
"Dr. Sakaki dies. You take the throne. You doff all convention and  _appoint_  your successors, the undeniably talented but relatively inexperienced Blood Emperors. It smacks of conspiracy already, doesn't it? And they die. And here you are…appointing me. A longtime rival, but someone who has all the connection in the world to the very thing we're ignoring. Were this organization in my hands you know I would appeal to The Empire to take immediate action against Kunimitsu Tezuka, former alliances be damned. Tezuka has always been picking at us, one criminal world against the other, and it was always Sakaki who dismissed my arguments that his intentions were darker. My judgment was clouded. I was  _emotional_. Now Sakaki is dead. The evidence is, at this point,  _damning_  against Tezuka. He provided us with fodder for a long time. He's been our exclusive supplier, do you even comprehend that? It's hard to be murderers without victims, I'm sure you're all coming to realize that. We're going to get reckless soon as our hunger grows, we're going to break our patterns and get arrested in the process. This isn't simply Tezuka interfering with our  _hobby_ , he's driving crazy those of us he isn't finding a way to kill!"   
  
"What does  _that_  have to do with me? I'm not the one who—"   
  
Atobe pointed at me. You do not continue speaking if Atobe Keigo is pointing at you. "You're the one who has not mentioned a word about moving against him. You've forced us into blackout. If that isn't an act of sedition against The Empire, I don't know what is."   
  
"I'm protecting us, Keigo."   
  
He laughed and made a face that suggested he couldn't describe my stupidity with words, and then pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're wanting to smoke out the mole, but you're doing it all wrong. You're brilliant, Mizuki, no one here will deny you that. But in seeming so blind to one aspect of things, you give yourself away."   
  
"As what?"  
  
"The mole."   
  
"Even if that were true, you have no proof."   
  
"That's absolutely true, but seeds of doubt grow surprisingly strong once planted. You weren't raised by politicians. I was."  
  
We were the only two people in that room, it seemed. The only two people on Earth. He was wrong in assuming I never got my hands dirty. Certainly, it wasn't my M.O., but at that moment I was wondering about the beautiful ways I'd end his life. After I had my way with him, of course, which had to be a common sentiment within our ranks. When he got all fired up over Kunimitsu Tezuka, it only lent a color to his face that made him seem more…there simply wasn't another word for it… _ripe._  
  
"If I may ask, Atobe," Fuji spoke, still not looking away from me. Unnerving, "what would be your first act as High Emperor? Would you continue in actually  _being_  High Emperor, thereby proving yourself a hypocrite since you have only a third of the seniority currently on the books for succession?"   
  
Here, Atobe froze. I knew a few things about him, though no one knew them all. He was so guarded, as an emotional creature, probably because that's simply how nobility is. He did come from what the lexicon of today liked to refer to as modern nobility, and so I knew following Fuji's question that he was fighting against his pride and his loyalty.   
  
"You would be free to claim your rightful position, Shuusuke." Atobe said.  
  
"Well," Fuji flashed his eyes around the room. There were eight members present, including myself. Dwindling numbers, to say the very least, "I second the vote and I move for a count. All those in accord with No Confidence in Hajime Mizuki?"   
  
My heart was beating faster, my face was hot. There was a rage climbing to the surface, but of course I wouldn't take it out inside those hallowed walls. Why was I appointing junior members? Why was I ignoring Fuji? It should have been obvious to Atobe, and maybe it was. Regardless, whether or not I had The Empire and whether or not Fuji held power over me, whether or not I was taking the right course of action where Tezuka was concerned…I had what I wanted.   
  
For the first time, I was having brutal thoughts about my Yuuta. For the first time, I wanted to destroy the only thing linking me to some form of sanity. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that everything else was toppling down around me.   
  
Long fingers on my arm, and a deeper version of Fuji's voice in my ear. "It's over."   
  
I wanted to point across the way, right at Atobe, and tell Fuji "that man just killed your brother," but I didn't want to be so melodramatic when I'd have all the time in the world for that soon enough.   
  
~ KIKI ~  
  
I pushed the door open with my shoulder and the cat out of the way with my foot. She still hadn't gotten used to the idea of not mewling whenever another living thing appeared before her, but then, she was a Siamese and we should have expected that when adopting her. "Shhhh!" I urged, but she asked me a few more feline questions as I toed off my Chucks in the tiny foyer. She padded after me and into the kitchen, her collar bell jingling.   
  
"I'm not feeding you at 5 a.m., shhh!" I tried to look stern, and placed my keys on the proper ring hanging by the telephone. If I'd learned anything in the last year, it was how to be slightly obsessive-compulsive. You pick up on those traits when you live with a lovable control freak.   
  
I propped open the refrigerator, but I wasn't really hungry. After an intense argument inside my head over whether or not to drink the last pomegranate tea, I conceded to the fact that I needed to go to bed, and began to shed my layers. My cap, my gloves, my scarf – I tossed all those on the bar. In my defense, I needed to even out the obsessive-compulsiveness a little bit. There was a pleasant yin and yang vibe working in the apartment, and I wanted to do my part to keep it that way, even if it meant being a slob (me? Never!).  
  
I'd found an old David Bowie 'Diamond Dogs' screen-print t-shirt at the thrift store down by Hyde's Café, and I'd taken to wearing it over my orange mesh shirt. It fit in that soft, clingy, stretchy way that only really old t-shirts manage to fit, and as soon as I'd yanked off the mesh shirt in the bathroom I replaced the David Bowie one. When I had to sleep alone, I preferred to sleep in the most comfortable t-shirt possible.   
  
Into the hamper went everything else, until I was brushing my teeth in the faded vintage tee and a pair of red-and-blue striped briefs. "Can you believe these?" I'd announced when I found the set at Macy's. "There is no way straight men are buying these. Look, one pair has polka-dots."  
  
I was tired, but I was used to routine as well. I was never too tired to not be wound up by the time I got home, to not want to be a human alarm clock, which was the routine. The breeze-through door in the bathroom opened into the big master bedroom with the priceless view of the city. The downtown lights were still glistening in the pre-dawn atmosphere, but I wasn't looking. My attention was fixed with a grin on the wide bed, which I always referred to as the wrong size. Even though I'd never be able to go shopping for sheets, I knew it was the biggest, most comfortable thing I'd ever slept in, and the current occupant didn't hurt that fact most nights. After a night of clubs and rock shows, dancing and drugs, I suddenly didn't care about the glitter of the beautiful people, the models, the would-be celebrities. Not that I ever really cared about all that. I went out  _because_  I was one of the beautiful people, I was a model, I  _was_  a celebrity. At least, in my own mind. Everything that happened on the town happened in my own mind, really. If anyone made an effort to get to know me beyond just dancing next to me and talking about the new hot spots, they'd find someone bordering on antisocial. Truth is, I was just cautious. You had to be – attractive young guy, raving the night away, usually under the influence. Vigilance was the watchword. It was how I'd met Oishi, actually.   
  
The mattress barely jostled as I crawled up onto it, and over to the body on the side closer to the bedroom door. I didn't bother to pull away the sheets or the comforter, because it was chilly night and Oishi was a cover hog anyway. He was sleeping on his back with one arm slung out to the side and the other hand up under his pillow, supporting his neck.   
  
He'd followed me out of 360°, a classy and gay-friendly wine bar where I used to begin my nights. He'd tried to flag me down on three different occasions, and followed me to three different clubs in the process. If I'd taken more time than a glance over my shoulder to acknowledge him before brushing him off, I'd have noticed that he looked increasingly uncomfortable. Finally, leaving The Peanut, where I'd watched Hitman Hostel play a mediocre show, he pulled right up in his black BMW. I kept right on walking, stomping the pavement as I told him to "Stop following me!"   
  
It took him about a minute to get the words out between all the over-explanation, rolling alongside me at about three miles an hour. But by the time I understood he'd just been tailing me to return the $100 bill he'd seen me drop on the way out of 360°, I was willing to forgive him pretty much any social quirk. I stopped walking, he stopped the car, I apologized and came over to his window, he returned my money and promised to get out of my face, but I asked him where he wanted to go.   
  
"Home." He said with a beleaguered sigh.   
  
"Not big on the club scene, are you?"   
  
"No. I always thought it was nothing but drunks and sex-addicts, myself. I'm just…boring. You seemed to be having fun, though."   
  
"Well, I'd be lying if I said I was totally sober."   
  
"You still seem different."   
  
We were sharing a moment, but a passing motorist suggested rather firmly that he should 'get out of the street, asshole!' and I shot back with a far more colorful suggestion before returning my attention. "I'd love to bring some of the fun out of you, but…I don't go home with people, so don't think I mean it that way. I am neither a drunk nor a sex-addict." I stuck out my tongue and laughed.   
  
"That's sort of refreshing to hear." He looked gorgeous and relieved and did I mention gorgeous? "How about something to eat, then? I haven't had dinner yet."  
  
"I have $100. My treat."  
  
Several dinners, a few movies, a concert or two, and at last one close-to-perfect-as-you-can-get night together, and I was domesticated. Not completely, of course, because Oishi knew me inside and out within two months and understood and supported how important clubbing was to my emotional happiness. The job thing, he didn't worry about so much: "You'll find your calling soon enough," he'd told me, acknowledging also the fact that I'd grown up with a baseball team of siblings and was still in the process of breaking out of the good little brother image. Besides, he'd been promoted to head of HR at the pharmaceutical office where he worked, and the gig was paying enough for him to more-than-comfortably live.   
  
Now we were sharing everything, and I'd even given up clubbing on Saturday and Wednesday nights because I wanted to sleep in with him on his days off. All other mornings…it was like this, Always with minor variations, but the same basic plan.   
  
I snuggled myself into the comfortable saddle of his hips and watched him sleeping for a minute or so, just smiling at him, at the way even his slumber seemed well-planned and methodical.   
  
It was fifteen minutes past 5:00. He didn't have to be into work until 9:00, but I knew my Oishi and how he liked to have the time to do everything right before work. Besides, I wanted a bit of time with him that wasn't hampered by breakfast and neckties and the morning news. And Samantha. In what was probably a bit of an assholish move, the more I thought about it, I'd shut her out of the bedroom for the time being. She was just far too much of an attention whore, and there wasn't room in my plans for two of those.   
  
I bent down, close to his face, and blew a softly on his cheek. His muscles quirked but otherwise he didn't react. "Oishiii…" I whispered.  
  
Another stream of cool air, this time nearer to his ear. He gave a little chunter of a moan and his eyes fluttered the slightest bit. I giggled, a little. "Wake up, you."   
  
Situating my lips high on his jawline, I started to kiss gently around it, following the trail of barely-there overnight stubble to his lips. "Nnnn…Eiji…" he always sounded the same in the morning, just waking up. Not many people sound particularly one thing or the other while their brain is still adjusting to its own processes. I held off on kissing his lips, and pulled back slightly. I was surprisingly keeping the maddening desire to start moving my hips at bay.   
  
He took in a deep breath, turned his face up to me, and opened his eyes in the dreamy light of 5:18 a.m.   
  
"Good morning." He greeted me with a warm, loving, sleepy smile.   
  
"Good morning." I wiggled out of happiness more than any erotic intention, and bit my bottom lip.   
  
"What have you been up to?" He lifted the hand that had been thrown out to his side, and placed it on my hip.   
  
"Same old, and a few cool things. I got to see Back Forty play, finally, for the first time since Heather left the band. That was a treat. Missed seeing Yin at the show, though. Then I had my tattoo appointment. It's all nice and touched up, now. It's really looking awesome."  
  
"Oh, yeah…" he was starting to wake up. "I want to see it. Turn around."   
  
I did just this, and straddled him the opposite way, pulling up my shirt to mid-back and showing off the stylized artwork copied right from the opening folklore sequence of the  _Watership Down_  animated film, along with the broad, looping script that read, in a ring around it, "All the world will be your enemy, Prince With the Thousand Enemies. And if they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you." The tattoo had been Oishi's idea, actually. I'd wanted a literary piece for a few good years, but I'd never decided on anything that was me without being cliché or overdone. He suggested something from  _Watership Down_  and I was skeptical. I'd read the book in high school but I'd never seen the movie. Within the first five minutes I was sold, and now I had a black, brown, and red El-Ahrairah on my back, effectively sitting inside of the Lord Frith. The quote was easy enough to choose. It suited me rather well, we both decided.   
  
"Does it hurt?" Oishi asked after complimenting the work-still-in-progress, for all its intricate detail. An, my artist of choice, had a wonderful light hand but she worked very slowly and very painstakingly. Emphasis on the pain. Since I'd started going to her she'd had to remind me on more than one occasion to stop whimpering and take it like a man. Usually I'd just tell her to talk to me, and she'd tell me stories about her brother the Chief of Police or her classmates at the community college, and I'd get caught up enough to forget about the fact that it felt like she was drawing blood from the same spot for about twenty minutes at a time.   
  
"A little, yeah." I pouted, and looked over my shoulder. His hand ran down the curve of my back to the hemline of my briefs.  
  
"You're wearing these." He laughed. He loved them, I knew he did. Cute underwear was one of his biggest weaknesses. As reserved and self-conscious as he was, I'd once managed a handjob out of him in the movie theater parking lot by wearing a pair of Scooby-Doo Underoos.   
  
I went ahead and pulled the shirt over my head, arching my back as much as I could and shaking my ass just a bit. The things fit me very snugly, which was another thing he liked. "Good morning?"   
  
" _Very_  good morning."  
  
He sat up and turned me around, careful not to touch the area of my tattoo. He was shirtless, as he usually was, and I took the opportunity to get my hands all over what I could see of him while I sat in his lap, reaching a perfect boiling point.   
  
This wasn't to say my wake-up calls always led to these encounters. We were wildly affectionate, sickeningly touchy-feely to any outside observer, but we were as frugal as we had to be with our more engaging romps. Time for sex was sparse, and neither Oishi nor myself went in for quickies on any normal day. I had to assume this wasn't a normal day, because almost as soon as Oishi was rubbing between my legs and watching my reactions, he was sweetly informing me: "I'll keep you here so we don't hurt your back."   
  
"Oh?"   
  
"Yeah. Help me…" he was tugging down at the blankets, moving them under my body and away from us both. I shifted around, finding new and wonderful angles to rub against him in the process, and stretched down with my ass in the air to kiss him as hard as I could while he hurried out of his bedclothes.  
  
"Need my help?" I sort of addressed his crotch without meaning to. Admittedly, it was my primary matter of inquiry.   
  
"You've given me enough, thanks." He kissed me, his ferocity and intensity distilled through all his motions, each of his limbs and fingers and areas of movement. Efficient, and incapacitating. I would sleep like a baby today.   
  
Now, my single infidelity in the history of my life with Oishi was something I had fits over on a regular basis. I didn't know if I'd ever tell him, but if I did I'd be sure to mention that all it did was cement the fact that no one would ever be as good for me as he was. Kaidoh had been a decent lay, and I'd certainly come for him, but I'd been in a little bit of a haze and it didn't help the weakness of my will that Inui was watching us and I was a born exhibitionist.  
  
But when the chips fell, all mine were going to Oishi, forever and ever. He could kiss me, he could hug me from behind, he could hold my hand in the park, and all of this with the same perfect touch that he made love to me. Now, "making love". That's such a thorny phrase. It's almost been watered down, so that all you think of is champagne and bubble baths and rose petals and missionary position and no passion whatsoever. The romance novel version of sexuality.  
  
It's not that I, by 6:00 a.m., wasn't riding Oishi's perfect cock with the speed and force of a well-oiled machine, and it's not that we didn't moan and I didn't coo and he didn't make my toes tingle when he quite purposefully threw in a well-placed filthy word or two. One night, a few months ago, before the incident with Kaidoh, he'd even called me a little slut, and it was all I could do not to bust a nut right then. In true Oishi fashion, he'd apologized for it over coffee the next morning, and it escapes my memory now, how I reacted to the apology. It just goes to show – it's not like we weren't fucking. It's not like we weren't fucking to beat the band, and in fact if there were a National Fucking Championship I'm sure we'd be top contenders. I just preferred to call it making love.   
  
Because we were in love. Simple, right? Not cheesy? I still can't convince myself of that. Still, it slipped into conversation. "Last night when we were making love…" "You wanna leave this thing early and…um…make love?"   
  
It's almost as if Oishi forced a certain propriety upon me, stoppering all my crass behaviors, which he then promptly uncorked in order to fuck me blind and relieve it all. This is why I always take a second look at people who seem rather reserved and self-contained in public. This is why I even went so far as to offer myself up to Inui in my lowest moment. Sure, the one you call the quiet one may not be the life of the party, but wait until he's got you in bed.   
  
Striped briefs around my thigh, band just underlining my moon tattoo, hands crossed behind my neck with my elbows pointing up, I was letting him guide my rhythm with his hands. It all blurred together a little bit, the long night catching up to me in a wave of ecstasy as I came. I collapsed over him, breathing heavily as he focused but didn't  _focus_  on finishing up. He took the time to play around with one of my nipple rings as I kept working my hips up and down, up and down, up and down…  
  
He held me in place after a bit, pinning me to him, silently signaling and bringing my face close to his when he came.   
  
It wasn't until he emerged from the shower and found me to still be awake (something even I find remarkable) that he felt the mood had dissipated enough to inform me: "I'll be working late. And on Wednesday."   
  
"Oh?" I was pouty, still riding the high of remembering his whispering voice telling me how much he loved it when I was on top. He sat next to me on the bed and put a hand on my thigh.  
  
"Yeah. A…a guy in my department died. It's…it's sort of solemn to even think of it this way, but a lot of work has to be done to pick up the slack."   
  
"Oh, hon…I'm sorry." I read a bit of distress on his face. "How did he die?"  
  
"There's the really scary part. He was murdered."   
  
I tried not to react with all my force of sometimes-misplaced emotion, and just pursed my lips in on each other. I held onto Oishi's wrist and let out a long breath. "That's heavy."   
  
"I just…" He couldn't finish the sentence with anything other than a shake of his head and I didn't expect him to.   
  
"Did I know him?"   
  
"Hiyoshi."   
  
I didn't. But I still held onto Oishi for a few more minutes, drinking in the depth of the silence, wondering what sort of working relationship they had, if any at all. It wasn't out of line to say I'd be as dumbstruck by the murder of anyone I knew of, even peripherally.   
  
"I'd never known anyone who got killed." Oishi finally said.   
  
"I love you." I interjected, trying to steer him back to a sunnier side before he thought to much about it. Comforting him was easy, but the challenge, what he needed me to do, was pulling him back from the precipice of getting lost in the concept.   
  
"I love you, too." The 7:00 a.m. sunlight was shining in beautifully through the still-open windows and his face fairly sparkled with a mixture of post-coital shimmer and natural vitality. If there was anyone in the world I didn't want to see break down, it was my Oishi. He was everything I stood on, he was half of me.  
  
I sat up in bed and embraced him. That sort of tragedy, that sort of thing, always happened to someone else. I didn't see us ever becoming 'someone else'. But I suddenly felt so much concern – perhaps it was that vibration of universal compassion that Oishi put out, rubbing off on me – concern for my friends who did have precarious ties, who ran with that sort of crowd. Maybe they weren't great friends, but they were friends anyway. I just wanted them to be safe.


	8. Yuuta

I only had one custom ringtone on my cell phone, and that was for Mizuki. When someone is essentially putting you through college, you want to make sure you don't miss a call. I suppose. On the other hand, it may have just been my passive-aggressive way of expressing how much I tended to hate him at times when I thought about it too much.   
  
"What the Hell is  _that_?" Momo asked as my Sidekick began to fairly blast with the ultra-britrock sounds of Oasis.   
  
I was moving an entire shelf, and so I let it go to voicemail as I grunted in response. "It's called 'Be Here Now'."   
  
Momo sort of snorted in reaction to that, and helped me continue to restock based on the new cabinet plans. "So…you wanna check that?" He pointed at my hip in due time. Of course it wasn't like Momo to  _forget_  anything and just leave it alone.   
  
"Nah, it's the same thing as it always is. Mizuki wants to see me. I'm literally on call for him."   
  
"You mean he wants to…" Momo made a big flaming deal out of that last word, as if we both weren't totally aware of what was being implied.   
  
"Yeah. Geez, just help me with these, okay? Stop baiting me."   
  
He laughed, arranging the glasses as I handed them over. "Why don't you ever swear? I mean, I've heard you do that maybe once."   
  
As if I hadn't been getting  _this_  since high school, which admittedly wasn't that long ago. "I was just raised very strictly, is all."   
  
Very strictly. "Goody Two-Shoes" would have covered it, but it didn't fit in with the whole male prostitute thing, so I never went to that extreme of my personality. I really liked Momo – enough that I thought of him as my best friend (pathetic, that), and didn't want to burden him with the details behind my second life. Tezuka was very good at matching us with the right clientele, and even though I was a whore I was sticking to a very critical persona. Being the Good Catholic Schoolboy in a sex roster made me an appreciated commodity, and also ensured that I rarely had to lift a finger in order to please those who wanted me the way I was. It's a lucky thing I still fit into my school uniform.   
  
I remember my first day at St. Rudolph's. It hadn't been difficult to get in, and there was little argument from my parents when I'd asked to go. Money wasn't an issue, and they just assumed I was more devout than my brother or sister had been in choosing an educational path. Truthfully, I sort of hated the school, but I loved the fact that I didn't have to be around Shuusuke during the most crucial four years of my young adult life.   
  
Actually, I don't remember my first day so much as the ride home, and the hours following. Shuusuke had gotten his driver's license that year and, since our schools weren't maddeningly far apart, he agreed to pick me up. My protests, of course, had fallen on deaf ears. He picked out a black sports car (Momo would be able to tell me what it was from the simplest description, but I certainly wasn't a "car guy") and got it for his birthday. I saw that thing come rolling up in front of the school and dashed to the passenger side, ordering him to drive off before anyone could see us.   
  
With the gentle arrogance I'd known my entire life, he laughed and merged slowly back onto the main road. "Are you afraid someone will see me? Ashamed of your older brother?"   
  
"Darn right." I crossed my arms and scowled. Honestly, I didn't want it to be how it had been all through middle school. 'Yuuta, your brother is so cute! Can you introduce us?' 'Why aren’t you getting good grades like that, doesn't it run in the family?' 'So I guess you're, like, the black sheep, aren't you?'   
  
"Ah, well. I suppose I deserve that." He reached over and mussed my hair, and as usual I was too much of a pushover to do anything in retaliation, or to tell him to stop. "It's a nice day. Let's go to the park."   
  
"No, let's not go to the park. In fact, let's just go home. I have a lot of homework."   
  
"On the first day of school?"   
  
"You heard me."   
  
I holed up in my room and tried to distract myself. I didn't change out of my uniform and was still wearing it when Shuusuke knocked on my door. When I didn't answer, he just opened it. We didn't believe in locks, in our house. More specifically, our _parents_  didn't believe in locks, which by proxy meant we weren't allowed to ever mention the concept.  
  
"Go away, I'm reading."   
  
Shuusuke didn't come right up behind me (he never did), but he sat on the edge of my bed and took note of the book in my hands. " _Where the Red Fern Grows_? Again?"   
  
"Shut up." That was another sort-of forbidden thing in the Fuji home, but now that we were all beyond the age of 12, mom and dad assumed we were going to fly off the handle thanks to hormones. There were still taboo words, as expected, and that list was a lot more ridiculously exclusionary than in most households, but 'shut up' wasn't on it anymore.  
  
"Yuuta," his voice changed subtly, just subtly enough that I registered it as being  _that_  tone, and my ears began to burn, "you need to tell me what's wrong. You haven't been this way in a long time."   
  
When I was younger, because I didn't like going down the stairs in the dark, I used to let myself into Shuusuke's room during thunderstorms, or after a nightmare, and snuggle up to him. No matter what, he always made me feel safe. And he used that word a lot. Not 'It's all right, Yuuta' or 'There's nothing to worry about', but rather 'You're safe now.' The effect was profound, and even at 21 I couldn't reconcile my righteous indignation with the pleasant memories of how secure he'd made me feel. Not even our parents showed themselves as that lovingly protective. I would nuzzle up under his chin and he would kiss my forehead. The lines began to blur, then, on what kisses meant. A psychiatrist would have a field day with me, even if it didn't go beyond that (which it did). But I'd rather lobotomize myself with a spoon than let a shrink near my reality. That's what made it reality, after all – the fact that it was mine. If anyone twisted it around to tell me what everything meant  _now_ , well, too little too late.  
  
Thunderstorms and nightmares turned into nights when I just plain couldn't sleep turned into nearly every night after my twelfth birthday. I came into his bedroom crying after all the lights had gone out, all the guests sent home. Our parents' bedroom was on the first floor, and we were on the second. Yumiko took the attic on the third floor since she had a lot of older friends and our parents didn't want us accidentally hearing or seeing anything not meant for our age group. I liked to think of the second floor as ours – mine and Shuusuke's – I believed so deeply that no one would ever hear us, and I suppose no one ever did. So I was less high-strung about crying. If dad had seen me crying like that, I'd have gotten a stern talking-to about being a man or something, about turning the other cheek, some conservative patriarchal bullshit disguised as fathering.   
  
But Shuusuke understood. Instead of "don't", instead of an order to stop, he wanted to know "why". I told him, wracked by emotion fueled by testosterone. "They made fun of me."   
  
"What? Who did? Today? At your birthday party?" He put his hand on my back. Even then, I wouldn't have called his hands big, but they were so elegant and light that it sometimes felt that way. The warmth his touch offered me...he was beyond his years then, and always had been.   
  
"Yeah," I wiped my nose on my pajama sleeve, "we were all talking, and they found out I'd never had a girlfriend, I'd never kissed a girl…you know, I don't think half of them were even telling the truth, I can't be the only one!"   
  
I was babbling, more than a little, but Shuusuke understood. He clutched me around the shoulders, then, and dragged me further onto the bed, holding me near. "Nah. They're liars, just trying to look better than they are. They wanted a target and it was a mean thing that they chose you, on your birthday. You don't have many good friends, do you?"   
  
Shuusuke was tactless, even back then, but when tactlessness is so accurate and honest and phrased with such a compassionate tone, it's hard to be  _truly_  insulted by it. "Naw. Mom just…told me I had to invite people, so I wouldn't seem antisocial, whatever that is. So I did. Guys in my class, guys on the baseball team."   
  
"Yuuta…what if I told you  _I've_  never kissed a girl?"   
  
I pulled away from him and wiped my eyes (with the opposite sleeve), staring carefully once it wasn't through a film of tears. After a sniffle: "Nuh-uh."  
  
I 100% did not believe him. And who would have? He was adored, he was perfect, he was handsome. He was… _Shuusuke._  I was just Shuusuke's Little Brother. But he smiled and mussed my hair (which I didn't mind so much back then – in fact, I didn't mind it at all, and I sort of relished it. I don't know if Shuusuke knew he was pulling strings in my formative mind-map back then, but he had to be aware of the fact that I was just beginning to settle into puberty. He was smart above all things – he had to have known what he was doing. It's why I grew to detest him) before going on. "Oh, it's true. You think mom and dad would let a girl within five hundred feet of our house?" I giggled self-consciously. "…and I don't believe in kissing someone I don't really, really like. If I don't have time to get to know someone, why kiss them?"   
  
"Yeah…but maybe you can get away with it because you're popular."   
  
"Yuuta." That was the first time I ever heard that tone. I looked at him, and his eyes were a shade different, a little sharper, looking right through me. I have no idea what happened then. I know the physical reaction, that is, but I don't know  _why_  or  _how_. "I'm not everything you think I am."   
  
I'd stopped listening to him because I was most disconcerted by the erection I was trying to deny that my own brother had brought about. I guttered a breath and shook my head although I didn't really know what he'd just said.   
  
"Yuuta," he reached down for my cheek, which was still wet with tears, and pulled it around. I couldn't really hide from him, and I'd always been a pushover. I wasn't going to yank my head away. Besides, I was terrified. What would he think, when he realized what had happened? I couldn't very well get it to go  _down_ , and the more I thought about it, the more he touched me and the more he  _talked_ , dear Christ, the harder I got. I actually whimpered when I faced him, "what's the matter now?"   
  
"Nothing!" I stammered immediately.   
  
"…well," he didn't believe me – I could tell from the sound. His other hand touched the other side of my face, thumbing next to my ears. My heart promptly tried to break a speed record and I would have been shaking if I'd been standing, "the only person I really, really like is you. So from now on you don't have to force yourself to be friends with people who aren't going to be nice to you. I don't want them to make my brother cry, do you understand? My Yuuta."   
  
His eyes were so big, so blue, and I think they put a tangible lock on my mental faculties. I just nodded – maybe half a nod. It was all I could eke out.   
  
"I'll keep you safe, and you can do things on your own terms – no one can tell you what's right and what's wrong, just trust me: you're perfect." Those words mean a lot to a 12-year-old, especially when they're coming from someone you believe implicitly.  
  
He kissed me, and I kissed back, and The Line faded into the distance as we sat there, in silence, not really sure of what was going on. "Now you can't say you've never kissed anyone."   
  
"But—" But  _everything_.   
  
"Shhh. Yuuta. It's late. Let's just talk about this tomorrow." He lifted up the covers and I couldn't back away from him now because my heart was twisting around and aching. I couldn't say 'no, I don't want to', when this was how we always slept, and I couldn't even say I was feeling profoundly wrong, when I really  _wasn't_. I held my breath when he pulled me to him like he always did, and I tucked my head up under his chin, and my erection pressed into his thigh. Considering what had just happened, I didn't know what to expect.   
  
We didn't talk about anything the next day, or the day after that, or even five years, seven years, almost ten years down the line. It just wasn't a topic for discussion. As if by never talking about it, we weren't giving it an identity and the glory of existence that might dare to be found out by something else, even the wind, even the grass. We didn't even talk about it in that moment. Shuusuke made a little noise of surprise – nothing descript, just a noise and that was it, that was Shuusuke. He listened to me and felt me struggling into a comfort spot for a minute or so, before his hand shifted down between us and under the band of my flannel pants. My eyes pricked with tears and I didn't know why. The only words he even uttered were: "Relax, it's okay." And I pushed my face hard into the softer side of his chest, muffling myself when his hand moved faster and I started to breathe heavier.   
  
Our parents were the type, you can very well imagine, that wrote notes for us to be excused from the fifth grade sex education assembly. I waited in the library with a few other kids no one ever talked to, and felt angry and humiliated. I had no idea what was happening there, in Shuusuke's bed, aside from the pieces I'd been able to tinker together based on what I heard my classmates talking about and things I saw on TV.   
  
By thirteen I sucked my brother's cock and by fourteen I asked him if we'd go to Hell if we did what he was suggesting we do next. He'd been working on me for weeks, a finger at a time for a good half-hour at a time, and I'd not minded because it felt so  _good_ after a few minutes. Also, he always told me I was safe. It was all okay. Nothing bad was going to happen. Then, he started to scare me a little.   
  
"Hell?" He answered my question with what sounded like another question as we curled up together.  
  
"Yeah." I didn't like the tone he was using.   
  
"Well…Yuuta…you know how we never told mom and dad about this, how you've never told anyone else, ever? And I haven't, either?"   
  
"Uh-huh. What do you mean – do you mean we're going to go to Hell?"   
  
"I mean…"  
  
It was a Sunday night and thoughts of fire and brimstone were still on my mind from that morning's sermon. In the evening youth group, we'd gotten a long lecture about peer pressure and, though they never really touched on it, I knew Father Stuart had been talking about anything but marital sex being an abomination against God. It was slowly dawning on me, as it had been all evening. "Shuusuke. What we've been doing is  _wrong_."   
  
"But I  _love_  you, Yuuta. Don't you love me?" He sounded cool, calculating, and suddenly I realized what had always been lacking in his voice, except in those key, brutally affecting moments: passion.   
  
Heated words, an argument in hushed whispers, and I kicked the covers away and stormed back into my own room. It wasn't a huge flare-up over one single thing, it wasn't a cataclysmic moment of realization, but it was a defining moment nonetheless. For almost a year I didn't go into his room anymore, and I would sometimes get really sick at school when I thought about it.   
  
Not because I hated the memories, but because I wanted to go back to it so badly. I was terrified, that's all, of what Shuusuke wanted me to do next. I wanted to rewind and erase it all, but I couldn't bear to part with those memories. I took to self-abuse and in those moments of weakness I'd just tell myself it was okay, because this is what Shuusuke would be doing anyway. But my hand never felt the same as his did, and nothing, not even at 21 and after too many lovers to count, would ever be as good.  
  
I did everything I could to put distance between us. I even sank our parents for $10,000 in private school tuition. I got really sick again on that first day, and damned myself for being such a selfish, sinful, ungrateful  _child_. I didn't need God to do it. I'd already sped up the process enough, I figured. It went downhill from there. But to get back to that particular day, it could be said that I was feeling more than vulnerable enough by the time Shuusuke came in and started interrogating me on my own turf.  
  
"You're what's wrong." I shot back in the typical high school freshman way. "Go away."   
  
Like spider's legs his fingers curled around the top of my book and lowered it, then pulled it away. "Stop it, stop being juvenile."   
  
He wasn't usually so forceful, and understand that my brother's forceful seemed to be about 1/100th of what it actually was. But I was feeling especially emotional, and I just sneered at him and rolled away, sitting up. "Don't tell me what to do."   
  
I stood up and went for my desk. A few fresh textbooks could stand to be cracked open, I thought, and since I barely had anything to do away from school I had a valiant study ethic (even if it rarely paid off as well as Shuusuke's). Now, a few times while we were growing up, we'd fought. That's expected of siblings, no matter the other circumstances. And every time, Shuusuke got this look on his face, all over his face, that permeated everything about him and all the details you perceived if you chanced a glance. It may have been just an instant, but I would usually detect it, and it was nothing if not a harbinger. Toys would be broken, someone would get shoved down, and one time he threw his lunchbox at Yumiko. I asked him one night why he always got  _so_  mean when he got mad, but stayed so calm 99% of the time. I suggested that it might be better to balance it out. But Shuusuke just told me that it felt like something else was taking over, and he couldn't control it.   
  
He'd told me not to worry, that his number one priority was keeping me safe and that he'd never get that way toward me again. For about couple of years, yeah, he made good on that. And then there was the first day of my freshman year. I paused with my hand on my science textbook and tried to think of something suitably nasty to say to him, but he interrupted my thoughts. "Yuuta. Look at me."   
  
I turned my head, more to give him a defiant glare than to actually obey. I clenched into frightened compliance when I saw that look all over him.  
  
"Do you want me to leave you alone forever, is that it? Do you want to just pretend nothing has ever happened, like we're not even brothers at this point? Because that's how you're making me feel. That's what I think you want."   
  
My cheeks pinked. I couldn't believe it. We'd never, ever mentioned it, even in passing, outside of the bedroom. He wasn't going into specifics, of course, but it was making my stomach turn all over again. Worse than that…  
  
"Don't you want me, Yuuta?" He sounded equal parts desperate and malicious. And he was walking toward me. I put a hand to my face and kneaded at my eyelids – everything felt strange and I couldn't tell him what I was really thinking. Because I didn't  _know_ what I was really thinking. My body was telling me things that my mind was volleying right back, and it just made me…sick.   
  
He grabbed me around the waist and it was the first and only intimate contact we'd ever had in the daylight. His lips brushed the skin just over the starched collar of my uniform. I whimpered again, same as I had on my twelfth birthday. Like a knife was on my throat, I tightened my whole face and turned it away. I squirmed a little in his arms before I sort of melted, before his lips were full on my pulse, and his arms tightened.   
  
A puff of a sigh later, and his hand wandered down the front of my pants. Everything about his touch was there, as it had always been, but there was another layer to it – a possession, an intensity. A suggestion that I wasn't really safe.   
  
"I got you hard."   
  
I finally fought back. Wrenching and flailing, I pulled myself out of his grasp, and then I flattened myself against the wall. "Don't ever touch me again! I'll tell mom and dad, I'll tell Father Stuart!"   
  
"You were part of it, too. You'll be in just as much trouble."   
  
"I don't care! You scare me now! Go away!"  
  
"But—"   
  
"Don't  _ever_. Touch me.  _Again_."   
  
I shut my car door in the parking lot behind the Jack Knife and remembered the sound of the door slamming as Shuusuke left my room, all those years ago. I cranked up the radio as the engine started and let Muse drown out the memory of my mother rushing upstairs to ask what was the matter and the ensuing frustration I'd felt when Shuusuke wouldn't even dignify me by shouting back at my accusations that he was being "mean".   
  
Of course I never told on him. Shuusuke had been right – I was just as much at fault. When I'd let those instincts from my body be read by my brain, I had realized that I was wanting him to tear my uniform off and fuck me painfully – like a punishment – on my desk. That's when I'd gotten violent, that's when I had to put my foot down.   
  
So I went into the business of having my uniform off and being fucked painfully. Not all the time, mind you, which was the beauty of things, but on specific occasions that always left me…well...I feel like I really shouldn't be even giving these thoughts weight, but it's no use hiding from them – I liked it best. It's weird, it's fucked up, and no matter how many classy, shy women (usually schoolteachers – no coincidence there) just wanted to act out their (admittedly) vanilla little fantasies, no matter how many male executives just wanted to take me to a restaurant somewhere and fondle me under the table, the ones who hurt me were the ones I never grew tired of.   
  
True. I sort of hated Mizuki. You hate anyone who knocks you around, has (literally) violent mood swings, and treats you like a thing rather than a person. But he accomplished something I hadn't felt in a long time, from the very first time we "met": he made me feel wanted. In any job you like to get compliments, praise from higher-ups or clients, and when Tezuka told me that Mizuki wanted me to be his personal escort, I'd taken on the task feeling like I'd finally reached a goal, as socially unusual as it was.  
  
At my lowest, I liked to imagine that he was Shuusuke.   
  
He was experimental, and liked to try new things. Sometimes the results were fabulous for both of us, sometimes for me, sometimes for him, and sometimes they weren't good at all. Regardless, there was always something new to keep me thinking on my feet (or on my knees, or on my back…no use making generalizations). Therefore it wasn't odd at all for me to open the door to his home (I had a key) and not be greeted, not even by a light in the hall. I knew my way around well enough. I rolled my eyes halfway, adjusted my tie in the mirror using the light through the hallway picture window, and proceeded to the bedroom. Maybe he was there, maybe he wasn't. Most likely he was monitoring my reactions. There were video cameras everywhere. I knew that much because he liked to brag about it, about watching us together when I wasn't there.   
  
You're probably wondering now, and I want to assure you: no. I didn't know anything about his affiliation with The Empire. I didn't know about his "experiments".   
  
When I entered the bedroom, the door whined just a little, and I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. Before I could take even four steps inside, feeling my way around a little awkwardly, I felt the warmth of his body behind mine, and then I felt something soft and smooth over my eyes. I smiled a little bit to myself and didn't say a word – because a word hadn't been said to me, and those were probably the rules – as the blindfold was pulled taught and tied behind my head.   
  
I was prodded forward with one finger at the small of my back, and wondered what sort of bad day he'd had that would put him into the type of mood to not talk. Mizuki's main failing, besides being an absolute bastard, is that he talked too much. He'd prattle on in the worst situations possible, when I might otherwise be enjoying myself. After all, he wasn't terrible in bed. It was just his personality. If he'd just take me against a wall once in a while without having to qualify it all with a filibuster, it would do us both some good.   
  
He had long, elegant hands like my brother, and so it only helped him in that regard, but it wasn't what I wanted lately. Lately I'd hope for moments that his hands left me, so I could imagine someone else (I do a lot of imagining, and I do apologize for spilling it all here, but this isn't exactly amateur hour for me. I am Catholic, after all). That someone was Momo, but God damn me if I'd let on. There's a reason I sort of enjoyed my line of work, there was a reason I hadn’t taken the step of having any serious friendships or relationships. I'd confessed enough to Momo already. I didn't want to feel the burden of needing to let him in on every sordid little detail of my life, which would probably make him drop me like a hot iron. Oh, well. I could imagine it if Mizuki's hands would just drop away from me, for a moment.   
  
So I put myself in that position, as the single finger stopped me by the shoulder and, in the absolute darkness, swept over me, as a signal I took to the best conclusion I could determine. I began to undress, and thanks to the blindfold I didn't even have to close my eyes to imagine I was doing it for Momo. I even pulled out some borderline-seductive poses I rarely remembered I had, just thinking about it as I loosened my tie, kicked off my shoes, and went through the whole methodical strip show. Finally, standing there naked, I felt the blush spread to my cheeks because I let the fantasy get to my head a little too much. I really did lose myself to the thought that it was not Mizuki, but my best friend right there, and what a shameless whore he must have taken me for after that display. Then my brain came back around. Maybe I wanted him to think of me that way. Let's just get it out of the way, get the sexual tension taken care of, and then face the music about how destructive I was.   
  
I had to remind myself not to speak. I was chomping at the bit to ask 'what's next' or request some further direction. I smiled to myself again, when his fingers turned me back around, and then pushed between my shoulder blades. I let myself walk until my knees hit the bed, and then paused. Sure as I had expected, I got another little push. This, I had to brace myself for. The depth of the blackness made it too easy to project my own fantasies, and as I considered everything, as I crawled onto that bed on my hands and knees, I couldn’t help rejecting the possible – Momo – and replacing it with the most poisonous thing.   
  
Mizuki's bed was soft and big, and when I removed myself from the reality, I was floating somewhere totally intangible, on a cloud in the night sky, and…that's where the romance ended because all roads seemed to lead to Shuusuke taking what was sort of due to him, in a way that never lost its ability to set me afire. I'd tried it, now, at least – imagining Momo from the get-go, and it just hadn't worked. Not with Mizuki, at least. Maybe I'd keep trying, just to ween myself little-by-little. But this was the perfect opportunity.  
  
Before, I'd been wondering about what sort of day Mizuki had been through that would shut him up. A bad one, I figured, as he felt me out anxiously and hurried through the process of foreplay. Enough, but not what I was used to. I thought back to a night a few months ago, when he'd literally teased me for three hours and then sent me home. I kicked my share of walls that night. So it was fair – if he had one extreme, the other was bound to come out eventually. He didn't feel brutal, he just felt...different. Driven by something. I wanted to talk to him, remarkably, just to set myself at ease.   
  
Quite literally into the mattress, he fucked me. Holding myself up by my hands began to get tiresome, and no one could say I wasn't fit enough to handle such pressure, usually. Finally I just fell onto my elbows, and even without any noise from him I could tell from his physical reactions that it pleased him. When his hand came around to stroke me, I think my mind had gone too far away from me. Faceless blindfold sex should have been everyday fare if it was going to feel  _that_  good.  
  
Good, like it hadn't felt for about a decade. Good like Shuusuke's hand. I didn't care what was driving Mizuki, I didn't care that I was going to be aching tomorrow in places I wasn't used to aching. I just wanted it to go on. I could usually predict him, and I started to push back against him in anticipation of an orgasm that, much to my surprise, didn't come. I pushed, though, still, and deep inside and in the saddle of my hips and the untrained tendons of my thighs I felt the sort of pain I'd wanted years ago. "Shuusuke!" I cried out, not a care in the world and feeling like every sick-to-my-stomach day had been a test leading up to this moment, as I came.  
  
Mizuki's hand froze as I murmured and moaned, dripping out onto his fingers even when his hips stopped moving. I didn't want to apologize – it's not that I didn't feel the  _need_  to, it's just that I felt like being contrary and seeing just how much more of a punishment I would get. His hands – Shuusuke's hands, or whatever they were in my mind, now – grabbed me passionately then, and pulled me up, until we were both on our knees. He had one arm around my chest and the other hand over my mouth. I let go of what I was holding in for almost three years in my brother's bed, and wailed out into his hand as he thrust into me harder, faster, as deep as he'd ever gone and then some. My thighs were locking around him, quivering. Doomed, I thought for a split second, but it was in my subconscious and it wasn't enough to make me enjoy anything any less, that the best sex of my life would be with an often-loathsome john in the utter darkness, while blindfolded, fantasizing about and calling out my brother's name. I was just story after pathetic story.   
  
Just when I thought I was reaching the point where I couldn't move my hips in that position anymore, he finally came, and I would be lying to say I wasn't relieved. We were probably only getting started for the night, and I'd hate to lose all my stamina right away. Losing Mizuki as a client would be the last thing I wanted. Especially now.  
  
Still, he was commanding a different energy that night. He embraced my body tightly, holding it close as I heaved with breath, and then he kissed my neck – the spot on my pulse that would have been just above my uniform collar. I breathed in. I swore it was just my mind playing tricks on me.   
  
Then my lover spoke. "You're safe now, Yuuta."   
  
It was Shuusuke's voice.   
  
"He's dead now. And you're still perfect."


	9. Tezuka

"He was vice."   
  
"How could you tell?"   
  
"Lots of ways, really. Affected class, like he was trying to bring what he knew my employees are like. It doesn't work that way – I take the rough ones and turn them into something else, and usually it's not that apparent. You want to keep a few gems unpolished. But him…" I realized after a moment's deliberation that it was not prudent to go on about such things in front of a possible enemy, and so I wrapped it up quickly, "he'll be back, though. I'll remember his face."   
  
"I could've told you," my guest half-laughed into his teacup, holding it like a coffee mug, "his name is Kamio, he works for Chief Tachibana."   
  
"Is that so?" I eyed him the way I eye everyone, this stranger with the messy dark hair and the half-ironed shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Spot-cleaned tie. He had no idea, but I already knew everything I needed to know about his personality. So why was he here?   
  
"It is. But before we were interrupted, you were saying?"   
  
"Yes. Shishido, was it? Private investigator?"   
  
"That's right."  
  
"Mr. Shishido…I'd be glad to assist with your case under normal circumstances, considering especially that two of the involved are dear members of my Academy, but trade secrets are trade secrets, and who can predict the day when I will be the one under your microscope, our inner workings compromised?" Surely, the thought of Ryoma or Yuuta in danger would have frightened me on any normal day. But I knew the story that Shishido didn't. And I wasn't about to reveal as much to him. Breaking someone's heart should have been easy for me, but it had been done to me before. The man who was trying to protect my two boys did not want to know the truth behind the situation, for either of them. I didn't even know him beyond what Shishido had told me, hadn't met him, but I knew the power Ryoma had over people he trusted, and the way Yuuta attracted those with a savior complex. A heart was on the line and I couldn't bring myself to be blunt. For once.  
  
Besides, trade secrets were trade secrets. I took another sip of my tea, holding my cup properly in the hope that my guest might pick up on the habit. It was unlikely.   
  
"Momoshiro Takeshi has reason to believe that Echizen Ryoma is the killer. All we want are identities of the members of The Empire. No need to protect him, I'm not in this to keep serial killers from getting what they deserve."   
  
I drew in a long breath through my nose and the smell and taste of Earl Grey were all through my senses for a few moments as I sat the cup down. I side-stepped the subject of Ryoma. "You know of The Empire, then?"   
  
"It's the only reason I've come to see you."   
  
No emotion betrayed my calm façade, but I will admit that those words worried me in a place I hadn't actively admitted the existence of for some time. This young man with his sharp eyes and his devil-may-care demeanor. Around the same age. Perhaps little too much excessiveness…but knowing a type is still knowing a type. This was  _his_  type. God help me. "And without your partner. You made that clear," my eyes, glancing down until now, flared suddenly up at him, "why?"   
  
He looked around the parlor as if there were spies everywhere. My home was modest compared to some mansions in this district, but perhaps it was my spartan sense of décor that forced a larger-than-life feeling upon people. Shishido took a deep breath and stared up at the vaulted ceiling.  
  
"Choutarou is following actual leads. All of them are winding up  _dead_ , but…he's following them. I'm in this for one man. And I know you can help me."   
  
Still, no change. Nothing that the naked eye would ever pick up. On the inside, I was screaming. "What makes you sure of that?"  
  
"You're the only other one he didn't kill. I've been to the Hotel, I've seen your picture there. He hasn't forgotten. You must know his weakness."   
  
The only sound in the room was my chair as it scooted back across the hardwood floor. "Please excuse me."   
  
I made my exit from the room, and allowed myself a frustrated breath once I was in my study. I removed my glasses, pinched the bridge of my nose, thought. I'd heard of this boy, heard from Fuji. Fuji had been present at the ceremony. For my terrifically disturbed friend, it had been dinner conversation, but I'd thought about it for hours, for days, launched my initiatives against The Empire based on a jealousy I'd never really admitted to having. I knew Atobe was calling me out, but I knew also from Fuji that The Empire was too leery of his obsession with me to ever begin a counter-attack. Fuji would see to that no matter what. All this time, these years…I'd gotten his attention, that was fair enough to say. I'd never thought his words were that final, but I often hated to admit how alike we were, at our best and our worst. Certainly we handled ourselves in different ways, but arrogance is the same. We'd both grown up well, hadn't we? A serial killer and the pimp who sends him boys to be killed. Usually they were boys I disliked, boys who'd wronged me or shown reckless behavior. Still, with all the gifts, we still waited. Now my avenging angel had made the cut very close to the source, with that home-wrecker Oshitari Yuushi and his ward. Now Atobe's mystery lover was in my parlor and I had to wonder: was it all another game? Tit for tat, a sign?  
  
The view of the garden from my study window helped me to concentrate, and so I did. Focusing on the possibilities, the permutations, the value this young man had and how Fuji had described the events of Atobe's shaming. Nothing added up. Cogs really were turning, Ryoma's missions really were striking fear into hearts I hadn't intended, and now I had to answer for my misappropriation.   
  
Arrogance is the rein that prevents you from reaching out, even when you know you should.  _Especially_  when you know you should. My differences with Atobe should have been set aside long ago, but instead it was all coming back to me.  
  
Fifteen minutes passed and I cleaned my glasses with my handkerchief as I told myself that if Shishido had left, he didn't deserve to know. I turned the corner into the parlor, pocketed the handkerchief, and there he was, as if I'd never left. Persistence, patience. There was no mistaking – he was the only bane of Atobe Keigo that dared come close to me.   
  
"In high school I was a straight-A student, Captain of this club and that, Homecoming King…you name it. When the annual Latin Club charity slave auction rolled around, I 'sold' for top dollar. You'd think I would have taken that as a sign. I was going to college on a scholarship for painting, but I was staying in the city. I could just has easily have gone upstate, downstate, across the country, across the  _world_  if I wanted. And I had been planning to. The Kunstakademie Munster had my transcript and my dorm assignment. I even had a plane ticket. So why was I staying?"   
  
I watched his face as I said it, reading every line of well-concealed reaction. I told myself this, but I'm sure he was watching me just as closely, watching the way my eyebrows pinched in severely.  
  
"Atobe is the reason I stayed. I was only 18 but I'd met him seven months before graduation. It was a garden party, one my parents took me along for in order to show me off. Luckily, I was an old hand at parties like that, and I couldn't really say I despised them. I felt more comfortable talking with people twice my age, even three times my age, than I did with those in my own age group, and so off I went. I met the young heir of the house after excusing myself to the washroom after a political discussion. I didn't make it a point to lock doors in other peoples' houses, and proper etiquette simply dictated that a closed door was not to be opened. But it was Atobe's house. It was his door. I was toweling my hands dry when he walked in briskly, shut the door with a flip of his wrist, and leaned there. Neither of us spoke at first. I certainly didn't have anything to say.   
  
" "Isn't this rude of me?" He finally asked, eyes locked on me, taking a sweep of my body occasionally. I'd seen him at other parties, other places, always with his little band of entitled miscreants, but we'd never actually exchanged more than pleasantries. I didn't know what to do, which isn’t to say I felt trapped. No, Atobe had some time before he made me feel that way."  
  
Shishido looked like he knew what I meant, and a little ashamed for the fact. I didn't press.   
  
"Even after I humored him with what came very close to being a conversation in the washroom at his house, even after I avoided him for the rest of the party and deleted his cell phone number after my parents told me I should keep it in the event that I might want to "stay on friendly terms with the young man likely to grow up to be the next attorney general", he was relentless. I suppose it was his tenacity that eventually broke me. He wrote me a letter – an actual letter, not a note or a text message – it was on real Crane stationery and it was about three pages long. He talked about feeling stifled, about the normal teenage angst of feeling suffocated by the expectations of his family, about how much he disliked most people he met because he felt superior to them. He elaborated that I should feel the same way, and that he was sure he'd seen the same thing in my eyes. All this he wrote while managing not to sound desperate or overt. I wrote back, and I told him he was right. Finally I agreed to a few lunches together, and then to dinner.   
  
"I was still in my school uniform when we wound up at the park and he took my virginity on the patio of the Garden Club building, under a tall eave of jasmine. It's not all as romantic as it might seem if you're just hearing sound bytes. He was beyond brutal in his physical expressions. True, I was just as into it at the time, but when I found bruises and felt muscle sprains later, I wasn't pleased. I only agreed to see him again if he promised to find some other way to channel his penchant for pain.   
  
"And that was it, that's what put the lid on it, for as long as it did. I left him unsatisfied on more occasions than I can count, because he went overboard. I don't want to think I only aided the urges of a fledgling killer, but at least I didn't get  _myself_  killed. And he was right – in a way, we were soul mates. I understood the way he talked, and he never took umbrage with the fact that I never responded to his attempts to rile me with words. Times like that he'd just hold it in, because he knew if he grabbed my chin or yanked me over by the hair the night was over. And I could fight him off. I'd done it before. I knew above all things that he didn't want to lose me, and maybe he knew that the greatest satisfaction I took from our relationship was the idea of having so much power in that capacity. In those days, he responded like a dog to my commands. Inversely, he just got more and more petulant with the rest of the world. He gave up on law school, decided to take a year off after high school, maybe longer. Live on his trust fund, maybe travel the world. The only directive of his that I agreed with and obeyed was that his parents never know about me, that the world at large never know about us.   
  
"I had a life on the line, as well. We both loved the thrill of being illicit, and I want to believe it strengthened our attachment, damned though it may have been. I was made of secrets; they were my lifeblood. Atobe didn't even know my biggest one, and I didn't expect him to. When he did, the conversation was one of his shouts and my calm responses. His breaking things and me trying to get a word in edgewise. By the time he understood that yes, I was selling myself, but no, my business didn't extend into what he was thinking, and no, I'd never yet been with anyone but him, he…"  
  
I stared at the mantelpiece, blank-faced, trying to find the right way to say it.   
  
"I've never felt that possessed by someone. Maybe he was hurting me when he held me down and drove inside of me that night, but I didn't even notice. The ferocity in his eyes was an insecurity I'd never seen, and insecurity I'll never forget. All he wanted was to be important, to be needed, to be The Only One. I'd stolen that dream from him, and he was livid. But I assured him, with as much candor and calmness that I could, that people paid to touch me, to get me naked, to have a real life schoolboy but not to…not to go beyond my prescribed limits.   
  
"He spent a full weekend practically wrapped around me, saying hundreds of things but always meaning something else. Words that came out sounding spiteful and harsh were really masked insecurities, and when I responded with tenderness, as if reciprocating in a language he didn't even know he was speaking, he'd just roll over and pout. He pouted so much. I wonder if he still does that. He's a child.   
  
"A week before graduation, he announced that he was engaged. I'd been expecting it, but he assured me that it was only a figurehead deal, that it didn't really mean anything. He kept pressing me, asking me if I was upset. I knew what he wanted; I knew he wanted me to be upset. He wanted that rise out of me that he had never, ever gotten. He only got it when he was violent, and so I suppose that's why he did it. But then I always left. He wanted someone of his own caliber to do to him exactly what he was trying to do to me. So finally I did.   
  
"After I slammed him against the wall, I backhanded his face and called him a damned fool. Having a mistress is one thing, but having a gay lover? It wasn't something I could risk. Of course he threw the whore thing back in my face, and so I fired back with the one I'd been saving, the heaviest ammunition for the most dire of days. "It doesn't matter, I decided on the school in Germany, anyway."  
  
"As intensely as he'd made sure I understood that I was  _his_ , he suddenly had to come to terms with the fact that I had him by a string. He was the one who'd changed, who'd accepted things, who'd molded to my terms. And now I was going somewhere he couldn't follow me without giving himself away completely. Would he have done that? I don't know."  
  
I closed my eyes and turned away from Shishido, my arms crossed as I paced over to the bookshelf and still only watched the inside of my eyelids. Memories. Too many memories.   
  
"I think I got in…a good number of punches. We fought for what felt like an hour before he had me on my stomach, with a knee between my shoulder blades. He grabbed my left arm and wrenched. I felt a ripping, straining pain, and then when he twisted it I felt…well, you know what I mean if you've had a broken bone. Only, most people have the luxury of falling off a ladder or being involved in some sort of larger accident. I suppose there's a very small percentage of the population who have had their arms actively broken by another human being.   
  
"He kept apologizing, kept kissing me as I just lay there in pain, not quite sobbing but not exactly holding myself with my usual decorum, either. But in between those words he was saying other things – things about how I wasn't allowed to leave, how I was the only thing keeping him sane, and for worse that I  _owed_  it to him, after all my betrayals. He already sounded crazy. I should have recognized the psychosis a long time ago, but I was an artist. Psychosis was par for the course in my line of study. I also put myself through a lot, put  _him_  though a lot, just so we could be together. Why would I have done things like that if there hadn't been a spark of feeling in my usually guarded heart?  
  
"I stayed here. Because I had to. He managed to dislocate my arm in two places and leave it in far worse shape than I could have guessed even with all that pain. And that was before he slammed my hand in the door…I haven't mentioned that yet, have I?" I turned back around, and held up my left hand. I closed it as far as I could, which wasn't very. "All the bones in the human hand, and he felt it necessary to break or fracture almost half of mine. That they didn't fit me with a prosthetic is amazing. I could have forgiven him for a lot of things, but no surprise that the Kunstakademie didn't want a painter who wouldn't be able to hold a brush for a year, best case scenario. Atobe made two points that night – that he would stop at very little to keep me, and that he was undeniably beyond the realm of the sane. But I didn't report him. He took me to the hospital, I told the admitting nurse a good story. It took about five hours for him to stop apologizing, and once I woke up in a cast and found him still in my room, I told him to get out. I told him to get out and never speak to me again.  
  
"Oh, sure, he tried to defend himself, but when you've gone that far there's little you can do. He tried to appeal to sentimentalities he knew I had, but it wasn't working. I just kept glaring at him, and telling him to go. "Go," I told him, "or I'll have the nurse come here." He blanched, and asked if he could at least say goodbye. I agreed to that much, knowing what it meant.   
  
"Our last kiss was the softest he'd ever given me, and his hands felt like they were handling spun glass. For a brief moment I forgot the pain and almost absolved him. Then, in my ear, he whispered "guess you can't be a whore, now, either." And I haven't spoken to him in over five years.  
  
"My employer, Madam Ryuzaki, was kind enough to let me take over some of the business aspects of the business while I recovered as best I could. Once my arm was better I worked for a couple more years before starting The Academy. Hand-picked roster, hand-picked clients, and a lot of logistics work. Most of that came when Fuji put me on the inside with The Empire. He never knew Yuuta was working for me until I told him, in a rare moment of weakness. What spawned that weakness is something else entirely, something that I shouldn't go into."   
  
Ryoma turning down the offer to stay in my house, Ryoma giving me a look that must have left twice the hollow feeling I'd always left in Atobe, Ryoma saying "yeah, sure, I guess" when I suggested that we do something like that again, and not a hint of emotion in his voice. Even after all the coaching I gave him on how to behave for the clients, how to make-believe like he was actually feeling something where there was nothing left to feel, he'd throw it all away for me, in my presence. I never asked him why, because I knew. Besides, it was ridiculous to be infatuated with someone half my age. I invited Fuji over, we talked the same as always, played a round of billiards, and I almost ended up on my back for him. But never. I loved him, but apparently I was a serial killer's poison. I didn't know if giving Fuji what he wanted would be a sedative or an accelerator to his tendencies. So I told him about Yuuta, to dull the sexual tension.   
  
That it did.   
  
But back to the detective who was most likely a heavy sleeper with a great work ethic who put up a front of not giving a damn just so people wouldn't take advantage of a kindness he didn't like to reveal when he didn't have to. Meticulous about certain things, completely careless about others, and the winds dictated which things were which. There was a melancholy peace about him, though, and I wanted to jump to the conclusion that it had to do with his partner. I wondered if they were more than simply business partners. Was that the reason I wasn't privy to his company?  
  
A melancholy peace, like he had everything he'd ever wanted, but was exhausted from outrunning his demons. The mysterious sort with the checkered past. He'd been to the Hotel. He'd seen my pictures there.   
  
"Does that help your investigation?"   
  
He wasn't here about the investigation. "It sheds some light on things, yeah."   
  
Sorry, Mr. Shishido. It was never you, it was me. Even now, it's me. Even when Fuji told me that there's a change that's gripped Atobe Keigo, that he behaved for the first time like he didn't care what The Empire thought, I wanted to keep imagining the day we finally would meet again, and the grand cauterizing of old wounds destined to occur. Because as long as my picture was still hanging at the Hotel, I was still the one he worships. Those were his words.   
  
Is this why the detective was alive? Because Atobe was foolish enough to take him to the Hotel, to make love to another in the crumbling palace he was keeping alive as an altar to what he thought was love? We'd shared many things, Atobe and I, but love was not one of them. It was all just a mutual obsession, one that was ongoing and would end up swallowing us both if we didn't bring this to a conclusion once and for all.   
  
"Ryoma has directives not to kill him. I'm afraid I can't make your problem go away." I said softly, though I'm sure I still sounded stern. I never was able to pull off compassionate.   
  
"So that does leave open the possibility that Ryoma is in danger?"   
  
"It might." Especially if Atobe found out about my more intimate coaching sessions, I'm sure.   
  
"Where is he, then?" Ah, the voice of a man on a mission. Sometimes I hated that sound. It reminded me a little too much of the crazed tone I'd heard from too many before.   
  
"Atobe Keigo is not a difficult man to find. The hard part is predicting what he might do once he is found." I compared Fuji once to a Venus Fly Trap and he was pleased, but Atobe was more of a spider. I would advise the young detective not to get caught in his web a second time, but my story had done little more than provide an extra reason. "You're not going to be kind enough to tell me about your own history with Atobe and what led to that nasty business when he joined The Empire, are you?"   
  
"No, of course not. You have a few pieces, you can put it together if you really want to. Or hire a detective. I'm in love with one and even he hasn't been able to figure it out. I never want him to."   
  
"So you're just going to keep running?"   
  
"That's right, I suppose I'm just going to keep running." He echoed me with a bitter jibe to the words.   
  
"You'd better run fast."


	10. Kaidoh

One of the fluorescent lights in the kitchen was sputtering on and off, making that horror-movie hum and encouraging me to finish making my sandwich as quickly as possible. I'd mentioned the situation to Inui already, and he'd said he'd "take care of it," but that was Inui's equivalent of my mom saying "we'll see" when I asked if I could get a ten-speed bike for Christmas when I was eleven. For the record, I never got the ten-speed. What I did get from my childhood was a seemingly incurable fear of things like humming, sputtering fluorescent lights, and a taste for peanut butter sandwiches. That was more of a lucky thing. If I didn't like them, I'd have been stuck with them anyway. Some weeks, they were all we could afford. This wasn't one of those weeks, but I didn't really feel like cooking anything. Besides, negotiations were being made and I wasn't about to be absent for any offers Inui might make on my behalf.   
  
Not that Momo was going to be lucid enough for business deals any time soon.   
  
I kicked aside a stray sneaker on my way to the bedroom and spoke only after biting into my sandwich: "We need to clean. And that light's still bugging me. How's the guinea pig?"   
  
Inui ignored my first two statements. "Too much benzo – there's no muscle strength. It's amazing, actually – this formula should be exactly what Fuji was asking for." I took a seat on the footlocker, tight though the space next to him was. We were used enough to close proximity.   
  
"Last I checked, Fuji Shuusuke wasn't a chemist."   
  
"Last I checked, he's still our best client, so I'm doing my best. Hm, maybe he  _is_  asking for just this – there's consciousness, but not enough to fight back. And not many blood-thinners in the mix. Fascinating…of course, he only made a slight alteration to my existing formula, but this is the perfect torture drug."   
  
I watched Inui make a few notes that didn't make sense on the jam-packed page of loose-leaf, and kept my eyes on Momo as I continued with my sandwich. "I'm just glad I don't have to think about my end of the bargain yet."   
  
Yes, I knew him. You couldn't have graduated from high school in this city without knowing Takeshi Momoshiro in some context. Our relationship had always been contentious, to say the least. He was a B-Team jock and I was a burnout who wanted to be a jock. We both excelled only at setting each other off, and stayed otherwise unimpressive on the whole. If I'd listened to my (few) friends more, or if I'd managed to give a teenaged damn about it one way or the other, I really could have made any sports team I wanted. Physically, I had everything it took, but I had no drive and even less charisma. What Momo might have lacked in skill, he made up for in those other two categories. I also knew him to be a grade-A dickhead, but if someone was going to bully me, I'm glad it was him. He tended to be in it for his own laughs rather than laughs at my expense, and at least he'd been enough of a man at 16 to fight me face-to-face. I'd won. We threw down again in our senior year, and he'd won.  
  
Maybe I'd confessed most of this to Inui in drugged stupors, maybe not. Either way, I didn't want to think about interpreting my suggestively fixated high school rivalries any more than I wanted to think about being Momo's hired gun against The Empire. Except for Fuji. Not that everyone on his little "list" wasn't showing up dead right about the day after he told me.   
  
Still. The choice was being forced upon me as I was left to contemplate either the old classmate on our bed or the reality of offing serial killers vigilante-style. Inui was lost in his own world of postulations and chemical equations. I was staring at Momo's ass.   
  
And wondering why. I wasn't the drugged one, unless Inui slipped something in my Skippy. We were just here seeking Momoshiro's payment for my services – cash up-front (or ass up-front, as I'd put it, only to have Inui tell me to take this more seriously, which made Momo smirk at me). Usually I was the test subject of any new product or formula, but Fuji was what Inui referred to as our "big name account" and my successful test could only be called a "trial run" given my history with recreational drug use.   
  
Then there was Momo. Still looking the same as he had on the day he'd stomped my ass five years ago, upstanding citizen with an honest job and a not-so-honest private life. With all the peccadilloes surrounding him it was a wonder that he remained, well…unsullied. Perhaps that's why I'd agreed to Inui's plan so happily.   
  
"What are you thinking, Kaidoh?" Inui asked that of me a lot, when I went into my long stretches of silence. It was never a curious, melodic tone with which he said it. No, it was an interrogation by force. It was no use hiding the truth – I'd stopped doing that long ago. Inui could see inside of my head, it seemed. It was like he felt the tension in the room.   
  
"Lookin' at him. Wondering when we're going to get around to it."  
  
He checked his watch. "Five more minutes. Though I understand your impatience. Look at that ass," he was not, I could tell for once, just trying to rile my jealousy, "just look at that. That is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Damn."   
  
Even though Inui's form of passionate bordered on sedated, I could tell when it was there. I'd rarely heard him this obviously ready for action. Sometimes I wondered if he, in fact,  _existed_  ready for action, and that explained how many times I found myself getting fucked without warning, and loving it all the more for the unpredictability. "Here's the question I put forth to you, then – clothed or unclothed?"  
  
He didn't even consider it. "Well, it's going to have to be unclothed if we intend to finish our experiment, Kaidoh."   
  
"I just mean—"   
  
Momo had remarked on it being "too hot down here" and had not-very-sheepishly kicked off the black slacks he wore to work after the solution took effect, before he collapsed on the bed and for a minute we both thought he might have passed out completely.  
  
"I know what you mean," Inui said mock-soothingly, "I haven't ever seen jockey shorts so tight on a guy who looks so…well, I'm not certain. He  _looks_  straight, to me."   
  
"You go right for that, don't you? Like with me?" We stared each other down, the way wild animals sometimes do. Over the years, we must have sized each other up a thousand times over, and it always seemed like a remarkably new experience.   
  
"Everything is not, in fact, about you." Inui deadpanned, and was about to go on when Momo mumbled from the bed. We both looked over. Inui's hand had transferred to my thigh with that last statement, though, and it remained there. It tightened as our guest shifted a little bit, keeping his back to us, his work shirt bunching up and showing a flash of skin above the waistline of his underwear. "God. Damn. It. I just want to sink my teeth into it."   
  
"We don't take the experiments  _that_  far." Okay,  _now_  I was jealous. Or maybe it was just that I'd never had enough control to hear Inui say things like that about me.  
  
"Humor isn't your strong suit. Stick with sucking cock."   
  
"Yours? His?" The evening was looking up. Inui's hand was still gripping my thigh, and though I desperately wanted to, he'd probably already planned meticulously for a way to keep me in line if I came out and said just how turned on I was, myself.   
  
"You might end up saving your throat, tonight. I want to—"   
  
"He's moving around."   
  
"Is he  _ever_."   
  
I'd been there. Momo's nerves must have felt about three seconds behind his actual movements. It would have been Hell for him to try and use his head. But tactile sensations felt wonderful, and that explained the little moan of relief that came close to being a chuckle when he rubbed his legs together and rolled all the way over onto his stomach.   
  
He was nice now. Nicer now than I ever remembered him being. Maybe life in the real world had taught him some manners. The way he'd approached me, apologetically almost, to make his business proposal, had been proof enough that I wasn't dealing with the same Momo, same though he may have looked. He wasn't so skinny anymore, and I wanted to hope the extra flesh was only going to make this experience worth my acceptance of the terms.   
  
Inui had worked as my agent, in so many ways. "So if Kaidoh agrees to this – to killing these guys – what is his compensation?"   
  
"I can pay you $1000 upfront. I've been saving for a new car, but—"  
  
"No. That's not enough. Not enough for murder, not even by a rank amateur. I'll tell you what…"   
  
After all the cards were on the table, of course he'd asked: "Is this going to involve sex?"   
  
Inui's answer? "How badly do you want these guys dead?"   
  
About an hour later, and there we were, admiring the view. Inui's statement before I'd interrupted had left me curious, maybe a bit overwhelmed by the possibility. "…what were you saying?" I had my hand on the shoulder next to mine, turning Inui slightly to face me, "you want to  _what?_ "   
  
If I would ever admit to loving anyone, in that intrinsic sense beyond all the purple prose bullshit, it would be Inui. He didn't deal in mincing words. "I want to fuck him while he blows you."   
  
Yes, it was enough to make my head spin, at first mention. Momo moaned again. I squirmed and fought back a sneer. "Inui, if he makes that noise again my dick's gonna get hard."   
  
"I mean, you certainly seemed to enjoy what Kiki did to you. But you didn't let him finish. What better payback to your old nemesis?"  
  
I hadn't quite thought of things that way, yet. The reality of Inui's suggestion was still sinking in. But there  _was_  a bit of justice and irony about it – coming down Momoshiro's throat, that is. I was skeptical on the logic of the situation, I had to admit. "Is he even…I mean…can he…?"   
  
Inui checked his watch at the same time that he was unfastening it. "That's why we've been waiting. Not at first, no. This formula wears off fast enough, as long as he's awake. He'll be able to suck you, don't worry."   
  
His watch landed with the empty cans of Red Bull and condom wrappers on the old cooler we used as a nightstand, and next thing I knew the front of my t-shirt was in his fist and he was grinding into me with a kiss. I let him pull me up and off of the footlocker, enjoyed it as his hands grabbed possessively down my back. "What about him?" I asked when Inui offered me even the slightest bit of breath.   
  
"Well," he couldn’t stay away for long, once his lips had locked onto their target. He untangled his tongue from mine again after he'd thought about it, eyes open, "does he have a nice cock?"   
  
I pushed away. "I don't fucking know! How would I fucking know?"   
He grabbed me back, sheaf of hair in his fist, and I managed not to wince as he brought me up to his face so close that his glasses began to fog. I rather liked it, actually. At least he gave me credit for being able to take the pain. "I don't know. The way you've talked about him some nights, I'd think you were letting him bone you in the boys' bathroom after 4th period."   
  
"Ohhhh,  _fuck_  you. I hated him. Still sort of do."   
  
His eyes narrowed very slightly behind the lenses of his glasses. That look still managed to worry me, just a little. At times, I wasn't sure what Inui was capable of doing at his most temperamental. Experimental was one thing – that I could usually handle. But when he actually let emotions enter the equation, it fucked everything up and sometimes I had to fight things back down to a reasonable level of deviance.   
  
Right now, he didn't believe me. "How did you lose your virginity, Kaoru?"   
  
"To you," I breathed against his lips, his left cheek, "we ran into each other online, met for lunch at the Chinese Buffet, and you were fucking my brains out halfway down the stairs to this basement. It hurt, you bastard."   
  
"Promise?"   
  
"Which part?"   
  
He tilted his head a tiny bit, and his eyes went all normal, heavy-lidded, and laden with thought again. Rational. He thought about it. He kissed me very, very gently, which was always the calm before a storm, or a sadistic little band-aid. "That it hurt."   
  
"You should remember. I stayed here for two days. I couldn't stand up without damning your fucking soul to Hell."  
  
"In those exact words, too. You have a great memory," like a trap of some sort, his mouth closed around mine, and he pulled me close, squeezed me at the base of the ribs and up, in just the right way that all my breath was gone before he let me go, moved behind me, and slapped me on the ass toward the bed, "go get him naked. And you, too."   
  
I pulled my shirt off and tossed it aside, remembering as I stood over the mattress how Momo had always made fun of how I slouched. I never had quite shaken that habit.   
  
The stray sneaker I'd kicked aside on the way back into the bedroom had been my own. I kicked him lightly in the side with one bare foot. "Hey."   
  
He half-turned and opened one eye at me. He just groaned, but the sound behind it got across everything I needed to be told: 'Leave me alone'. Not a chance.  _Not this time, not even after how nice you may have turned out._  Maybe Inui was right on some level. Maybe I did, subconsciously, since I certainly wasn't consciously boning or being boned by  _anyone_  during my high school years, want Momoshiro's attention as more than just a bully. True, I'd sought him out. Started arguments on purpose. He'd demanded that rematch in senior year and I'd been more than happy to oblige – a little honored, in the sort of way that makes me throw up a little to admit. It's not like Inui wasn't ever bullied. But he never fought back. It was too easy, at our school, to pick on the smart kids. Especially Inui. It was easy, and besides, he went through puberty with untold grace that left him seeming more frightening than wimpy. He shot to over six feet and filled it all out with…whatever it was that Inui had. Now it was a raw, sinewy sort of natural muscle, but back then I have no idea. We were only passing (but cordial) acquaintances. Momo, on the other hand, probably felt the same sort of pent-up hatred for me that I had for him. Bullies have that long-term effect. Always have, always will. And I fought back against Momo just as much as he doled out the teasing on me.   
  
I kicked him again in the side, this time harder. "Roll over, bitch." I mumbled.  
  
He did, with a manly whimper. A hand went for his side. I'd apparently managed to hurt him, a little. Well, good. When his back hit the mattress, my eyes didn't know where to go first. After a quick zigzag they settled on his navel, which had been left exposed by the twisted button-up shirt that was slightly too big for him and the jockey shorts that rode a bit too low to be considered properly hetero. I wondered who he was trying to impress, or if he'd just forgotten to do the laundry and nicked a pair from his pubescent roommate. Reasons didn't matter. He still had big hands, and he was rubbing his side, displacing his shirt even further in the process. Before I made a move to relieve him of the garment completely, I glanced down.   
  
No, no. There was  _no_  way I was thinking of sucking or even  _touching_  his cock—  
  
\-- my face against the pavement but my elbow landing in his ribs, over and over again as he tried to just suffocate the fight out of me, on top of me, more than a little sexual and probably more than a little pivotal in the development of my supremely fucked-up current behaviors --  
  
\--because he was here to do that for  _me._  
  
I unzipped my jeans and finally looked at his face. He stopped in the middle of a yawn and went from watery, squinted eyes to big, round, dark ones. He said something that sounded like "Oh, man, what the  _fuck_ ", which would make sense, because he probably thought he was going to be playing Inui's toy, not mine. Regardless, he was sending me out to do a hitman's job. It was a few notches up the criminal ladder from drug dealer. The least he could do was cater to both of us. Inui was accompli, after all.   
  
We were all past the limits of the law, now. We were all in this together. His face was so different from Inui's – so expressive, almost cherubic. I remembered that Inui's ideas had yet to let me down. I couldn't wait to have Momo on his knees between us. I shuffled out of the jeans and plopped down on the mattress, pulling immediately at his shirt. He was trying to protest, maybe, but I didn't care. I tried to imagine what it would be like to put a gun to someone's head and pull the trigger. I'd wondered that before I met Inui, when I was thinking of joining the Army. I always told myself that I could do it, as long as it was another human being. I didn't much care for them. I have very few redeeming qualities, I suppose. Thinking about killing someone made it easier to fight against Momo, who had very little strength to begin with, to wrestle him out of his shirt and pull him up next to me. He couldn't hold himself up on his knees yet, not with his hands. This would be interesting. I reached down and, testing my limits, played absently with one of his nipples. He half-succeeded at swatting my hand away, and I locked his head in my elbow. "You're going to be a lot of fun. Don't worry – I promise you're going to love this."  
  
His eyes were closed, but he wasn't unconscious, or drifting off in any way. He was probably forcing his brain to think and to evaluate. He made that noise again. But I'd already started to get hard, before I'd even sloughed off my clothes.   
  
"Kaidoh…" I'd never once forgotten he was in the room, but Inui's voice always managed to send me into a momentary lapse of concentration. I looked up at him. The light hit his glasses in just the right way. He was staring down at us, "I told you to get him _naked._ "   
  
I reached down and grabbed at the band of Momo's shorts, yanked them down to his knees, let my knuckles feel the taut roundness of his ass in the process. I didn't linger, and kept looking at Inui. "You can finish up the job."   
  
"And you?"   
  
"I'm going to leave that honor to him." I shook Momo's head just a bit. He opened his mouth, wanted to say something, but just growled.   
  
"Very well," Inui went about unbuttoning his own shirt meticulously, probably plotting every detail of the upcoming tryst. As impulsive as he seemed when it came to sex, I was sometimes shocked at the way he knew exactly what to do, exactly when, exactly where. Like he'd been over every possibility in his head. I'd tried to throw him off the scent a few times, but he was always able to bring it back around to what he wanted. So when I saw him eyeing Momo, felt my old rival breathing on my chest raggedly, considered how pleasant he'd been upstairs before the negotiations began in earnest, and most of all what it had felt like to be fucked to shreds on a stairwell…  
  
"Inui."   
  
"Mmm." I heard the sound of his belt as he removed it, and tossed it across the room.   
  
"Don't do him like you did me. At least, you know, be good with him." I didn't want to say the word 'gentle'.   
  
"Are you kidding?" Inui said without a hint of humor, "I'd never harm something I plan to send back into the world. You were mine the moment we started making out behind the café. I never planned to let you leave, but I was interested to see what your pain threshold was. You understand."   
  
"Sort of." In that completely twisted way that Inui made sense to me.   
  
"Good. Where's the lube?"  
  
It took some arranging. I stacked the pillows behind me and leaned back into them, listening to the comments that Inui was making on Momo's ass, stuff along the lines of how "luscious" it was, how he'd have to start keeping different food in the house to get mine in the same condition. Or maybe, he'd said (and Momo tensed at that moment, biting his lip and digging his fingers into the sheets as Inui started to finger his asshole), this would just be a nice vacation. I hated the comparison he was making to me being a work-a-day job, but I was otherwise occupied. I'd turned unexpectedly easy on him, unwittingly comforting. I was running my fingers through his hair like a fool, asking him questions like  _had he ever sucked cock before?_ , and he'd said no.  _Well then would he like to suck mine?_ , and he'd actually nodded. Not a scared sort of nod, but a tentative, thoughtful one that wasn't entirely a product of the drug – I could tell. This concoction of Inui's (I'd never attribute a damn drop of it to Fuji) made one overly trusting, docile, almost child-like, but Momo was coming down in a different way than I ever had. The mental control was returning, but the physical effects were lingering. Still, his whole body was clenching when Inui reached inside of him, so…Hell, I was no scientist. I could just tell it was different than it had been when I'd taken it, the few times I had.   
  
"You know I hate you for what you did." I said, as Momo had my boxer shorts around my thighs. He looked up at me.   
  
"Yeah. I do. I'm sorry."  
  
He managed well enough with words now, but his whole face was flushed, red, sweating. Spikes of hair had fallen against his forehead – he looked exhausted before we'd even begun. Would this sit well with Fuji? Fuck if I cared.  
  
"So do I…?"   
  
His apology was still sinking in. It was been simple, no-nonsense, and just what I needed to hear. Best of all, it hadn't been too late, and he still had his face in my lap. So when he took me at half-mast in the palm of his hand I was caught off-guard. He was being candid as ever about it, just stroking me like he would any old thing, until an unexpected moan from me seemed to remind him of what he was doing.   
  
"You just…yeah. That's good."  
  
Versatile. He was that. He opened his mouth against the head of my cock and didn't even flinch, didn't even make a sour face at the entire concept. His eyes got all heavy when he closed them, like he was focusing and relaxing at the same time, and Inui was right – he damn well  _was_  able to suck me. The hot depth of the back of his mouth for a moment, and then a rush of cold as he swept back up, licking from base to tip, tonguing me at the head. Without being the genius Inui was, I could tell that it was dawning on him that what worked when  _getting_  a blow job worked for reference in giving one, which was leading me to believe Momo had been serviced by professionals in the past. Or at least very fast learners.   
  
And then I remembered that he lived with an underaged prostitute whom he claimed not to have any interest in sleeping with. But when his head twisted down around my cock and the tip of his tongue teased the cleft of my dick, I couldn’t help but imagine…things. Dreadfully, surprisingly sexy thoughts about Momo and the café's resident late-night pet.   
  
He managed, by some brilliant stroke of luck, not to bite into me when Inui thrust inside of him, but he did let out a sultry type of whine I would never have imagined coming from the Takeshi I knew. The Takeshi who asked me once if I was a fag and I'd said "ask your mom" because I couldn't think of anything better. He was Momo now, just plain Momo, and Inui was already going full-throttle because Inui didn't like to slow down once he'd started.   
  
"Hey." I snapped my fingers lightly next to his head. Not that I'd ever done what he was doing, so I couldn't imagine the sort of concentration and coordination it took, but I wanted to feel it. Now if anyone ever asked, if I let myself stick around long enough for the question to arise, "have you ever been in a threesome?"  _Why, yes, I have._  
  
Momo took the weight on his elbows and sank against me, trying to stick to his secondary work. He did as well as he could, and I helped because I just wanted to be selfish. Once the three of us were in rhythm, I could feel Inui's thrusts hit Momo just as I pushed into his mouth, halfway so I didn't provoke too much that was unwanted. Halfway for now. Inui would come before I did, and then…  
  
"Kaidoh." Inui addressed me unexpectedly, and I lifted my head, looking at him, watching him fuck Momo, finally catching a glimpse of something I'd have been regretting to miss: the body between us. Inui was literally guiding his hips every beat of way, so the pace wasn't quite what it was when I was left to fight against his cock at a breakneck pace that always threatened to undermine the stability of our mattress. We'd probably already have broken a bed-frame, especially with his (and my) love of tossing me into different positions without warning, never breaking stride. With Momo, we had a backdoor virgin who was coming off a rather disorienting high. Inui's arms were working overtime just to keep the rhythm they had. I could see it in his muscles. I couldn't decide where to stare, but my eyes kept refocusing on Momo's ample ass meeting Inui's abdomen in steady syncopation. "Kaidoh, remember the first time I came inside of you?"   
  
"I do." I breathed a little harder. I knew he didn't mean the  _first_  time, the time that had made me a little sick and I was so embarrassed and aching from my shoulders to my knees. He meant the time after, the time we managed to get it right. My hand tightened in Momo's hair. He licked harder, and then sucked on the head of my cock with admirable control.  
  
"What did it feel like?"   
  
"Strange. Like it shouldn't have been possible, but it was happening…" I couldn’t put it into words. I couldn't put much into words.   
  
"Did you like it?"   
  
"If I didn't, I wouldn't have let you keep doing it."   
  
"Do you think Momo will?"   
  
"If he doesn't, that's just too bad," I sniggered, and played with the moist stray hairs near his ears, "push back against him. Come on. Just a few times. Don't worry about me, just for now."   
  
Not that I would have assumed Momo was really 'worrying' about me, in so many words, but my entreaty seemed to work. He let out a mighty breath, and it took a few tries but he finally met Inui's pace, gritting his teeth and his whole face, then another breath out, wrenched and crying, and another out. He tried to pull off to push back one more time, but Inui held him in place, and they both shuddered, a shockwave running through their bodies. Inui, as usual, was silent. Momo let out a little shocked noise. I wanted to say something, but I was stroking myself. I was lower than low, but I couldn't help it. How did I get here? What was surrounding me? What sort of lesson was this, and what was I about to do with my life?   
  
"You're not a whore." Inui informed him breathlessly, leaning over and tracing a line down his spine with one finger, "you're just an extremely rare and beautiful piece of ass, and I'm honored Kaidoh's usefulness was worth this. Now, if you'll—"   
  
It was too late. I was hardly conscious of what was happening until it happened.  
  
Before I knew it, we were wrestling on the bed. Momo rolled me once, with all the strength he had, and glared down at me fiercely with my come dripping from his face.   
  
"Oh, so I suppose you can take all of that, but when I come in your eye, you're suddenly—"   
  
He muffled my mouth hard with the bedsheet rolled in his fist, and I bit down where I wished his flesh was. He growled at me, wish-boned my legs around him, and just like that, he had his revenge and I had mine.   
  
On the footlocker, Inui was taking notes. About us? I didn't know. Out of the corner of my eye, I recognized the list Momo had brought along, the names of all the known Empire members still alive and well within the city. He fucked me hard and dry, and it felt a little like it had on the stairwell the first time with Inui. I dared to meet Momo's eyes. He wiped his face clean as he could and eyed me with wild contempt. I furrowed my brow and growled epithets that were unfortunately lost in the fabric of the sheet. Accusations, mostly.  _Is this different from fucking a 16-year-old?_  
  
Yeah, it wouldn't be hard. Inui said he knew someone who could sell us, or loan us, a gun (I didn't press on the subject of who), and I'd learned to shoot when I was a teenager.   
  
Me? I was a drug-dealer getting fucked by his favorite high-school bully in a dank basement while his so-called lover watched, and secretly loving every filthy moment of it. The least I could do for society was take out a killer or two.


	11. Shishido

Chouta-kun,  
  
Can you write an apology letter six years after the fact? Whether or not it's permissible, here I am trying it anyway. I didn't know a thing. I was barely 20. It was my second semester at that stupid school I probably never should have gone to and you said I might feel less cranky all the time if I went out and made friends. There's this bar near the school that isn't really a bar, it's more like a coffee house and a study joint, but everyone called it The Bar so that's where I went – The Bar. He was studying a German textbook and he just sat down next to me, and…  
  
Choutarou, all I can think of right now since it's too damned cold to roll down the windows and properly enjoy the sunset is how great it would be to have you in this passenger seat, just like it used to be. First time I went down on you in my car – it's the first 'thing' we ever did, right? I know I'm right. I remember things like that. How did I ever even imagine someone else's hands could've felt as good as yours, someone else's kiss? When we didn't have the nerve to try anything at home, before we discovered that warehouse by the Distribution Center on L.E. Clark Street…well, before we got around to the fucking, really, and it was all we could do with our hands and our mouths. I'd throw on one of those CD's I made, after I told you to make me that list of songs that put you in the mood and not to just lie and make stuff up. You wrote the list during AP World History and I had to help you study (actually study, not "study") for the test because I'd distracted you so much you popped a boner just sitting there, writing down some of the song titles and thinking about me. Baby, I remember the days I used to look at you the right way and you'd make that little frustrated noise and I'd know I just got you up. Where did that go? Where did it all go, playing Janis Joplin's 'Me and Bobby McGee' in my car as I kissed you and played with the chain around your neck? There was that strategic button, the second one down, and you always wondered why I never just unbuttoned the first one, too. It was more fun my way. Just the second button…and my hand was always cold, somehow, and you squirmed and arched like a girl into my fingers as I tugged and pinched at your hard little nipples. "Fuckin' erasers," remember when I said that? You laughed, but you were blushing, and I'd just be content to finally open up your shirt and kiss you and your neck and your nipples for a good ten minutes or so – Hum's 'Stars' would be playing by then and I knew you were always anxious not because I wasn't paying you any more immediate attention, but because you wondered what I wanted, what you could be doing. You were always impatient like that…sort of jittery, bossy in your own weird way. Baby, all I wanted was to do what I was doing.   
  
I fucked up. I fucked up so bad, and I'm sorry. He said he wasn't really in school, but he was taking classes. We became study partners. I told him I was studying psychology, which was true, but criminology paints a very straight image and maybe I was a complete asshole from the beginning and I was thinking on nothing but being a fucking flirt. I never thought he was better than you in any way – there was just this thing. Synchronicity, I guess. Such as – if I'd said criminology, he'd have moved on. I'd still have my pride, you'd still have someone worthy to trust, and I'd still have…well. We'll get to all that.  
  
You'd always say my name, sort of choking on it, and I'd just shush you and start rubbing between your legs. I was little – still am – so it was easy for me to twist down in the front seat like that. The very first time I put my head down there and kissed you on the thigh you said something – you said "No…no, you don't have to." You don't have to. Like it was this huge inconvenience for me, like somehow I was doing it because I felt obligated. I never felt obligated, you've got to know that by now. We were both new to it, though, so I understand…I guess you felt it was this forbidden zone, something so intimate and implicit…sort of dirty…not like we'd been up until then. It was crossing a line, wasn't it? Not to mention, it was you all the way down to the places I'd never known before, in the most impossible way. And it was still sort of slutty – we had a lot of living to do. You were embarrassed. Baby. You didn't need to be. I wanted you so bad. Hand to God, my mouth was watering, and I never thought I would've felt that way about…that…but there was something about you. Always has been. It just takes the moment, doesn't it?  
  
I didn't lie to you – I never lied. I said I was going somewhere with friends for Spring Break, and I was. I did. But I should have told you more. I shouldn't have gone. I didn't expect things to be like they were. You'd hate him. He's like you, and he's like me, but he's like both of us together and then multiplied by a billion, with some extra peculiarities thrown in. You know those super-dense stars? He's one of those.   
  
 _You don't have to…_  but you were already bunching my hair up in your left hand, digging the fingers of your right into the armrest. Do you know how much of a turn-on it was, that you were so nervous, so embarrassed? I hope I made you feel as goddamned sexy as you are, because I don't care how many "special" times we've had or how many "milestones" we've celebrated in sex, there's always that benchmark of sexy in my head, for you. It was all in the way you voice got deeper, louder, as I pulled your cock out, the way you told me "no" again but you were still holding my hair back. I can't speak for you, but I remember the way my head reeled the first time your lips touched my cock. I felt calm, sexy…not just desirable, but desired by you, which made all the difference. So how did it feel for you? What were those little noises telling me? What were the big ones telling me, too, when I just flicked around with the tip of my tongue, till I wondered how I ever would have been able to satisfy a woman that way. It wore my tongue out – still does – but you love it. Don't you? I could tell, but you weren't saying a word. You aren't the type. Not like me. I just want to know what was in your head, and what still goes on up there.   
  
What are you going to think when you read this letter? Will it sour everything?   
  
I told you they made me cut my hair on the force – some sort of punishment. I forget what I made up. You were pissed. You had every right to be. Now, what really happened is, I did lie to you. That's not how things happened. I don't know what you'll think, once you know. By the end of this letter, you'll know.   
  
But first think back on that first time again, how I decided at the very last minute, after coaxing and teasing and just plain sucking you for four more songs, that I didn't really want you to come in my mouth? Not yet, not then. Last minute decision. I didn't know what I'd do. You made this noise when you came – you don't remember it, maybe, but I do. God. I do.   
I'd never heard that from you before, and immediately I wanted to hear it again. If I hadn't just ragged you out right then, I'd have gladly dragged you into the backseat and made you fuck me on the spot, just to hear that again. So, it distracted me. My hand stopped moving for a split second.   
  
You guttered a little sigh. You looked down, and you apologized. The moment was gone the instant you realized you'd come on my face, for you maybe, but I still worked it out of you, until you were a raw nerve. "Nobody's perfect," I said, I I don't know if you thought I was talking about you, because I understand how you would've thought that. Hell, I would've thought that. But I meant me.   
  
I understand that by even writing this, I'm effectively ending my chances of ever having my favorite things again – your legs around me, your teeth nibbling at my ear familiarly on the sofa, your half-asleep face when you walk out to get your coffee in the morning. But I fucked it all up. You didn't do a damn thing wrong. Not a hair out of place, on your end. You know all those overdramatic classics we'd roll our eyes at in school, during our college years? Poets saying they'd rather die than hurt the one they love?  
  
Yeah, I'm sort of in that position right now, and I realize how impossible it is, when your crimes catch up to you. We're going to knock on a door tonight and I don't want you to be alone…and I don't want me to be alone. But for us to be together, you have to know the truth.   
  
I sort of want to die rather than tell you all this.  
  
It was too cold to keep going. My fingers felt numb on my pen and, as a result, my handwriting was looking less like the normal chicken scratch and more like pigeon shit. My car had day running lights and I was wary to turn the engine on lest everyone who came down that lonely road know I was sitting there inside, waiting to be mugged. It wasn't an unheard of thing in that area of town.  
  
The island was the most perfect place I had ever been, and of course I was just a starry-eyed city boy, but even though he knew the answer he'd still asked me if I'd ever had sex on the beach, or on a yacht. These were questions, these were offers. I thought, as I watched the sunset and wondered how cold winter would get now that the first real cold front of the year was moving in, about the one time Choutarou and I had gone to the lake, which was the closest we were getting to the ocean or an island or a yacht without three figures or a sudden foreclosure on our building combined with a "fuck it all" mentality. Choutarou loved the colors of the sunset moving across the surface of the water, and asked me if I'd ever seen such a beautiful thing. I said no, and I wasn't really lying. I wasn't really lying because the colors of the sunset were on his face and in his eyes the same way they were on the water, and I was watching him instead of the horizon. In the company of a fellow city boy I could have enjoyed falling asleep under a tropical night sky, but on the island I had to reign in all my enthusiasm, I had to play it cool.   
  
I held my palm over the letter I'd been writing, and tugged inward just a little bit. But I stopped. No way, not now. I'd come this far and I wasn't going to just crumple the thing up and throw it away after all that shit I'd gotten out of my system, finally. I tossed the notepad and the pen into the passenger seat and held the steering wheel firmly, fingers almost burning from the blast of the heat vent which was so near.   
  
There was more to remember than just the hotel or the sunshine or the fucking. There was midnight back home, there was being abducted, there were panic breaths so deep I nearly passed out before I was gagged to prevent any of  _that_  from happening. The blindfold. The words that were spoken, the voice that saved my life. And now there was a street address sent via text message in my inbox, sent from "Private", which I could only assume to mean Kunimitsu Tezuka. He was the only one who knew my cell number who would text me asking 'What room weren't you allowed in?' Okay, fine, I thought, I'll play along. I dredged up the memories. There had been lots of rules, and I'd barely been given enough time alone to exercise caution, but that particular guideline stood out in my memory. 'Room 349', I'd texted back. I got the address in response. I'd already driven by, after a late lunch and before sunset. Looked believable enough, with a big iron gate and a fleur de lis motif in the metalwork. Beyond that, I got a  _feeling_.  
  
 _Jesus Christ, Choutarou,_  I thought,  _it wouldn't have been easy to tell you, you have to understand that. Please understand that, please understand that._  
  
The car clunked into drive and I headed West out of the still-deserted overlook parking strip. Down the hill and into town, I kept playing "our song". 'Heartspark Dollarsign' by Everclear had been popular while were younger, and we'd embraced it as a theme for our relationship. It was a dumb choice, but it reminded us of growing up together and in the broader sense of being in a persecuted minority it transcended the racial theme. At least it was happy, on the inside.   
  
Into town and through the intersection by the art museum. Left onto S.E. 39th, finally, and my heart was pounding so hard I couldn't even calm down enough to parallel park. I parked further up the street where three spots were open, and the car clunked into stillness. The letter stared back at me from the other seat. I grabbed it, folded it sort-of in half, and wrapped it around my cell phone. I grabbed my jacket but left my hat.   
  
I walked into the office in silence. Choutarou leaned out from behind the partition where we worked, researched, and more than often dicked around on the laptop. I sort of half-smiled at him and he stretched back in the chair, yawning at me. "What's the story, morning glory?" He asked. Another one of those lame things we still did – even if it wasn't morning. It became the standard ice-breaker when it was obvious one of us had something on our mind.  
  
Now, I was usually the one who did the talking, but neither of us ever said things like "we need to talk" or initiated dialogs pertaining to the subject of Us proper. So when I sighed, turned around, and remembered to flip the Open sign before locking the door, I heard Choutarou ease back into his chair upright and roll, silent and waiting on me.   
  
"That's what you always do, you wait on me." I started thinking out loud. "Well, not always, but when it matters. You just don't get how wrong it can be, to do that. Not in any particular way, but…maybe in retrospect I've really wanted you to speak up, or put your foot down, in those times when you were waiting."   
  
"Whoa, heavy." He laughed a little bit, but looked ready to be concerned at any moment. "Rough day?"   
  
That was easy enough – chalk it up to a bad day. I was being given an Out, and I could take it. I could walk if I wanted. I fell into my chair and splayed out, pulling a face as I did. "Sort of. I got a huge lead. Probably the lead we need."   
  
He sat up straight. "What? Really? From who?"   
  
"From Tezuka." I looked down and to the right.  
  
"Have you checked it out?" He was chirpy, he was excited. Effervescent, even after all this toil and garbage-sifting to find our feet in this case over and over and over again. I felt sorry for him. With all we'd been through together, the pastiche of types of cases we'd worked over the years. Choutarou had never really been given a taste of true macabre. Tragedy, yes. Disgusting, yes. But I had my suspicions that his naivete was finally showing. "It's legit, right?"  
  
"Oh, it is. We're going tonight. It's an address. Leads right to the biggest name in The Empire, and now we've got it."   
  
I chanced a look up at him – his big brown eyes were full of relief and the thrill of the hunt. "That's insane. That is…we're sure he's not dead?"   
  
"There's no way this man is dead." I picked at a notch in the armrest of my chair, where I'd dinged the hard plastic with a metal shelf during remodeling a year or so ago. Choutarou was growing either suspect or weary of my monotone at last.   
  
He was a little bit quiet when he poked at me. "What the Hell, Boss. What’s wrong if he's not dead?"   
  
Another Out. I could have walked away, but I'd written a letter, and Choutarou had a right to know. For his safety, for his edification. If things went terribly wrong. But the words weren't coming.   
  
"Are you all right?" He asked. I realized I must have been silent for a full minute, at least.   
  
"No."   
  
A pause, and then what sounded like a terrified whimper costumed in strength. "Are  _we_  all right?"   
  
I'd always told him he had a way with words. "Chouta-kun, remember in college, when I told you to stop calling me so much and all that? Sort of pulled away?"   
  
"What's all this about?" Half-concerned, half-bemused. Okay, maybe he was one-third each of those things, and the other third was pure suspicion. That guarded face everyone gets when trapped in the corner of a Relationship Talk. "Yeah, I remember that."  
  
"Well…it actually wouldn't be a big fucking deal, except it has to do with this case and it has to do with me not wanting you to get hurt, and—" isn't this what people always did? Guilty people? Hide behind the 'I wanted to protect you' line, uh huh. That was not going to work, I knew going in. Choutarou was one tricky sonofabitch, when he wanted to be, and he wasn't a detective and a freelance psychologist just to pass the time. He was damned good at breaking things down to the quick. I should've just finished the letter.  
  
"Is this the part where you tell me you cheated on me?"   
  
Sometimes I really wished he'd go off on a rail, give me a chance to interrupt and be indignant. But he never did. He was a sharpshooter in confrontations. Bang, you're dead. There was nothing to be done about predicting, side-stepping, or blocking Choutarou's attacks. If, underneath it all, he weren't so emotionally volatile, he could've gone professional, been a detective in an interrogation room for a precinct tearing down someone's will to live, let alone lie.   
  
"That's only part of the story."   
  
He closed his eyes, searching in the moments of darkness for a way to escape, maybe a spontaneous command of time and space to make it so that this conversation never happened. So was I, really, only I'd been doing it since we'd taken the case. I stayed silent and finally he snapped at me, eyes still closed: "Well  _go on_."  
  
"I don't…I don't know where to…I started to write you a letter, but…"   
  
"I don't want to  _read_ , I want you to  _tell me_. Why?"   
  
"Because I was stupid, and young, and I was lonely!"   
  
"How many times?" His voice lowered a little, but it was probably because he realized he couldn't handle the question just as he was asking it. His eyes were still closed.   
  
"Just once! A…a few days, Choutarou. Spring Break."   
  
"God, I knew it." He whispered at the back of the chair, turning his face as if his faith in me disgusted him. "One person?"   
  
"One person." I said it gravely, because I knew that didn't make it any better, and because I knew the reality behind that one person, and how much One could mean. "I know I shouldn't have, but I—" he let me stew in my silence until I blurted it out. "I wanted to prove to myself that I loved you. Since you were my first, and I was yours, it just…I wanted to  _know_ …"   
  
"You've had how many years to think of that line?"   
  
"Can I tell you the fucking  _story_  before you tear into me? Give me at least  _that much_  time before you decide I'm not worth your time? Because you don't know what I went through. You don't know it was so much more than just a random hook-up with no consequences or anything like that!" I was surprising myself, yelling now, fists shaking.  
  
He didn't apologize – he had no reason to. He held his chin. I knew he was fighting back tears. Choutarou hated to cry, but since he'd been a boy he couldn't really help it. He got Hell for it, of course. A lot of that Hell was from me. But this? This was worth crying about.   
  
I took a deep breath and told him about The Bar. "His name was Atobe Keigo. I'm sure you've seen the name. I'm sure you've noticed how I've danced around it during this case, mostly because he's untouchable, but also because, well…because of our history. I promise you, Choutarou, it's not just what you think. He was like a magician, seducing me with all this opulence and luxury. I told him I was with someone but he kept pressing at me, kept wearing me down, like he knew I'd finally relent if he tried hard enough. And yeah, okay, I relented. He flew me to a private island for Spring Break, this place where his family once owned this whole resort destination thing – a big Spanish-looking hotel that was just standing there, some of it abandoned and grown-over and some of it just old. Worn-in. He said a hurricane hit it about eight years ago, that's when they decided to close the place for good, but they never sold the land or cleared it. He'd inherited the island after his eighteenth birthday as an investment opportunity, but he hadn't done a thing with it. Well, okay, that's a lie. He did a lot with it, but it wasn't what his family wanted. Though, oddly enough, it's probably something his family was more likely to approve of than what he did back home. He told me the island was safe, and he kept talking really…cryptically. He always did that, though, so I didn't let it get to me…" I held so much back. I wanted to get to the dire parts. The parts that might wipe that accusatory look off of Choutarou's face. But too much too fast was impossible, here. Everything was too much, really. What about Atobe wasn't over-the-top, what about him didn't sound like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel run through a Bret Easton Ellis-brand meat grinder?  
  
"On the fourth night, the night before I was supposed to fly home, I woke up and he was on top of me. Holding me down. Pushing my cadet badge in my face. He didn't accost me with words – he just stared into me, holding my badge, and waited until I was wide awake and too dumbstruck to move. I don't know what I was thinking, I don't know why I didn't fight him off or react with fear. That's all in retrospect, that I wonder these things. At the moment it happened, he'd managed to make me feel secure until that point, he'd managed to build himself up as some sort of benevolent god. As a mortal, in the hotel, my only place was to just be quiet and gather up my senses and listen."   
  
I remembered every word, but I related things to Choutarou without drama or the eerie intonations I remembered. I tried to frame the little story, but in my mind it was like trying to explain a poem I had memorized rather than simply recite it – and I sounded all the more ill-prepared for it. "I wanted to be with someone before," Atobe had begun, talking through me, like the words themselves were playing out automatically, "a few times, actually. To glut myself I'd always bring them here, play out this dance of romance and enchantment, and then break things off with some elaborate ruse which would always leave the other half yearning for me. You're the first one I've ever had who's given me an excuse to do it, and this is fucking it." I didn't ask if he'd gone through my bags or why, though I should have felt more violated than guilty when he shook my badge in his hand, teasing me with a straight face. "No one breathes the rules of The Empire outside of the Family, but I suppose telling you just one of those rules won't hurt things. We don't. Fuck. With cops. We try to stay away from them completely, never antagonize nor entice. I don't know why I never knew this about you. Did you not want to tell me?" Atobe mashed the badge into my face, twisted it, and for the first time I was getting legitimately scared as his voice rose. He let his hands fall away, and I listened to the thud as it hit the plush carpet. He composed himself for a few moments, shoulders heaving. I was paralyzed, convinced that whatever shit I was in, it was deep. I had no idea. He grabbed me, out of nowhere, by the cheek, his thumb hooking in and pulling, pinching down. The fingers of his other hand gripped my hair – long, then – wrapped it around the fist, and pulled so hard that it drew tears to roll down. "I don't know anything for sure about you. I don't know what you know about me. I don't know why you're here anymore. I don't know what I'm going to do, because I know the rules but it's more like the promise I made on this island is superceding all of that. Besides, I'd love to know that you're living the rest of your life in terror. That's a new sort of torture I haven't tried. Whatever the case is, if you were sent to smoke me out you're a complete patsy. No one who knows what I am looks at me the way you do, reverent without even a touch of fear. So you're innocent to that. If you were set up to bait me, I don't fault you. It's difficult to be disobedient, I know that very well. I'm finding it very difficult right now."   
  
Choutarou was listening to all of my filtered retellings of this memory with a placid face, but his eyes betrayed him. His concern was deep, and bit by bit I'd noticed the tightening of his posture. He hadn't heard anything yet.  
  
Atobe had kept me in that strange vise grip, closing his eyes for just a few moments. "I am not a torturer. I'm not like some of my friends. I find it distasteful and I don't like being nauseous when I'm trying to enjoy myself. But everyone needs to experiment, and so some time ago I decided to branch out, like an artist does. I realized two very important things: one, that I have little tolerance or taste for blood, and two, that I like to feel the release of death in my own two hands. That's what it is for me. I read somewhere that it's different for everyone who does what I do. 'What gets you off', the cops might say. You see, it's hard enough to strangle someone. I mean, it's  _really_  hard, unless you know just what you're doing. But once you have it down to a science it morphs  _into_ an art," his hand left my mouth and drifted down, caressing my throat with a broad sweep of his fingers. My pulse quickened as he curled thumb and forefinger around my neck, then. Choutarou's big brown eyes were replete with terror – I didn't know if he believed me, considering how unbelievable it all was, but I'd certainly grabbed his attention. "You're scared. You're clenching your sternocleidomastoid right now. I can see your jugular, but that's nothing special. I'm more excited to know your cartoid isn't that far below. Pinch the jugular, apply pressure to the cartoid – all roads lead to the trachea. I like to grab hold of the muscles, here…your sternocleidomastoid, if you forgot…and I just press in with my thumbs. It's like a massage, sometimes, especially if I can get the victim sufficiently pliant and unable to thrash about and make a big fuss. Crushing the trachea – that's what it's all about. But the beauty of the build-up and the breakdown is so intimate and intricate. First, oxygen cuts off, and there's a moment of diffusion, of disorientation. This is the point where I'll usually stop, if I'm only playing at it. It's not an unpleasant feeling. I'd show you, but I've already alluded to the fact that I'm not going to kill you, and I don't want you worrying. Besides…your neck isn't anything special. It's quite common, really. Your Adam's apple is too big. You're too skinny here. Anyway. After the disorientation there's a long period of knowing, of struggling. Everything struggles. Even in the most docile state, you can feel muscles, pulse, breath, everything fighting against you. It's like someone's grabbing onto you who's slipping into an abyss. They can't hold on. Slipping, slipping, grappling, fighting…finally, letting go. It's all very romantic, really. I don't expect you to understand, I just want you to know. Because that's how important my art is to me. I cut someone's throat once, in that experiment. Trying to branch out. I did so much research, I prepared so meticulously. I was fucking him from behind and he was unaware that anything was the matter, until I'd already cut through skin and muscles and the circulatory spiderweb of the neck. I knew immediately what I'd done wasn't right for me, but it wasn't like I could take it back. He wasn't dying right away, but I couldn't bring myself to get closer. I ended up closing my eyes and stabbing wherever I could – the stomach, the chest, about twenty times I stabbed him until he finally bled to death. Or passed out from shock and then bled to death, I don't really even  _care_." All this time, Atobe had been clenching my hair tight and molesting my neck. I wasn't about to move, at that point. Regardless of his claims, the 'oh God, oh God, I'm going to die' thoughts started running through my head, and I whined a little and shed a few tears. I told this to Choutarou, who was leaning forward in his chair with his fingers steepled at his lips, speechless.  _How could I never have told him this?_  I thought. All this in retrospect. The whole story had to be told for it all to make sense to me again. "I realized that, as attracted as I was to the human throat, I'd never wanted to see it flayed open like that. As intoxicating as murder was, I'd never wanted to see or smell or feel that much blood. I couldn't stop my stomach from heaving, and so I called a friend over to deal with the mess. I just settled in another room and tried to hold down several glasses of hard liquor while I knew he was doing even more unspeakable things to the corpse. When he finally wandered back in, having shed whatever gloves and layers he'd been wearing, I could still see the stains of red on his teeth, on the corners of his mouth, and I was too drunk to be scandalized that he'd do such things on my turf. Calmly, as if a long work day was finally at an end, he informed me that the corpse was on its way to the incinerator with his partner, he poured himself a drink, and suggested that I take a vacation."  
  
"Shishido. Shishido, what the  _fuck_  were you thinking when we took–"   
  
I wouldn't have gone so far as to gamble that Choutarou was past the whole infidelity thing, but serial killers do tend to make less-than-savory ex-boyfriends. I can assume that absolved me of a lot of guilt. I sighed at his half-wrought question and interrupted, shaking my head violently. "I don't even know! I said yes because Atobe was right – I've been living in terror. I wanted to do something to strike back. But…but Choutarou, I'm not even finished. I'm nowhere near finished. Please. Come on, it's okay, I'm okay. I'm scared as fuck but I'm okay for now, and the more you know the more you can help us out tonight, okay? Just listen. Baby, just listen to me." He was having a silent, fitful little panic attack, clutching his shoulders and wiping his brow and looking this way and that, wanting to speak but knowing my argument was sound. He wanted to hear me, but he didn't really want to _know_.   
  
Couldn't really blame him, there.   
  
I told the rest of the story in my own voice, by my own account. No more remembering things verbatim and making a half-baked attempt at conveying the nightmare I'd been roused to experience. That wasn't even the real nightmare. "Atobe told me he'd come to the island, taken a week to himself, and that he'd written a letter to someone – someone special to him, someone he'd never ever think of hurting. I know now that it must have been Tezuka Kunimitsu. I didn't know it at the time, but Tezuka Kunimitsu's portrait hangs in the antechamber or lobby or foyer or whatever the fuck it's called of that hotel. It's a huge black and white photo portrait, and he mentioned it was taken by a friend. You said Fuji Shuusuke makes his living as a professional artistic portrait photographer?"   
  
"That's right."   
  
"Answers that question. So. Atobe writes this letter to Tezuka, says the island is a spiritual place, a cleansing place, and that he wanted to make a promise to himself and to Tezuka never to kill if he was on that piece of "sacred" land – that's what he called it, "sacred land". So he invites Tezuka to visit him there, to just say the word and they'll go there together. Apparently Tezuka never wrote back. So now Atobe has this over-arcing sense of responsibility toward the island, even when he brings guests and would-be lovers, catch-and-release romantic interests. I got lucky. Unduly lucky, and it's one of the reasons I think I took this case. I got a glimpse inside, and with that I think we can work this thing, I think we can – I'm getting ahead of myself.  
  
"We didn't speak much. He just told me that story, and said "I'm sending you home tomorrow." And he left. I packed my bags in the morning, trying not to reconcile the Atobe who managed to be at once gentle and in-control with the Atobe who'd waxed on the romance of asphyxiation and had friends who ate people. I just tried to rein in my shaking as I met him on the landing, followed him down the stairs, took note of the portrait one last time, and debated on whether I should just make a break for it. What a retarded idea. Where would I run? It was an island. He was sending me  _home_ , I kept telling myself, but my nerves hurt so much by the time I boarded the plane and was winging my way home that I felt…bruised. Everywhere. I broke some shit in my apartment, I spent a lot of time just staring at walls, and I fell asleep and didn't wake up for seventeen hours. My body still hurt when I woke up, and it was all because of how wound I was, like a coiled spring pushed between two pieces of machinery. Goddamnit. I actually managed to fall back into routine in school and at the academy, but I couldn't stop thinking about Atobe. Go back and find my e-mails from that time, I was so detached from reality that I must have sounded like I was either tired all the time or…on drugs or something, I don't know. God. Choutarou. This is…I haven't even gotten to the best part." I chuckled humorlessly.  
  
"On July 10th I'd been working for a couple of weeks at the convenience store back home during summer break, just to pick up some extra money. I was trying to get all the funds together, even then, to put up a down payment for our future. I'd thrown myself headlong back into making things right with you, and I'd dropped my Fall classes – I had my B.A. and that was good enough for me. The academy was shit, I hated it, I hated the hour-long drive to get there on days when we had classes. I wanted to just do something different, and we were talking about all those possibilities for a business, doing all that research together. I'd managed to push Atobe out of my mind. I even tortured my nerves, some nights, by going back to The Bar and looking around for him. He was never there. I was so glad. So I was back home, and I was back on track. July 10th. I got home at one a.m. after closing the store myself, and my parents had taken off on their first ever "pre-retirement vacation" – they were going to Alaska, so I had a good week or so of the place to myself. I invited you over but you were nose-deep in summer classes and cobbling together your thesis proposal for the Fall. Crazy kid. If only you'd been there. Well, no. If you'd been there, who knows what would have happened. Maybe something worse. Never mind that."  
  
"The weekend after the Fourth of July. I was gonna come over to see you, but one of my friends had a birthday party during the week and I had to use the weekend to catch up."   
  
I gave a wan smile. "I suppose everything works out, then. I fell asleep on the sofa watching Justice Files reruns, and didn't wake up again until someone was shoving a tight wad of fabric in my mouth and bending my arms behind my back. Someone else grabbed my legs. They didn't say anything. I've never been so scared. Not with Atobe on the island, not with the lingering threat of a serial killer who knew my name and address lurking behind every movement of the clock. No, this was on a scale you can't possibly understand. I was abducted from my home, I had a hood thrown over my eyes after they sealed that gag in my mouth with electrical tape. They were efficient. After two minutes I was still wondering what the Hell was going on and why I hadn't pissed my pants, and they'd cable-tied my hand and feet. I kept my eyes wide open – what else are you going to do? – even though I had a hood blocking everything, and there were voices. I was loaded like cargo into the back of a van and I wasn't doing well enough for myself to really take note of what the voices were saying. I don't…I can't…Choutarou…"   
  
He could tell I was physically exhausted by all this retelling. His voice was broken by fear, but stalwart in the face of that. "Just…what happened, baby?"   
  
I rattled off details, closing my eyes and leaning against the desk with one hand splayed across my face. "I got a tranq to the thigh. When I woke up it smelled like furniture polish and the sweat inside my hood. I moved around – there was a lot of space around me. I let out a little sound, but it wasn't enough to test out the acoustics. I was on a hard surface, and the whole place felt airy. I didn't see a damned thing. They never took my hood off. I heard five distinct voices, but I can assume there were some people there who didn't speak. Basically…basically I gathered that I was in the belly of The Empire. This was Atobe's trial, for breaking the rule he made such a point to tell me about. Remarkably, though I can remember every word Atobe said to me when he scared the fuck out of me in the hotel, I can't remember much about that night. I guess that's a by-product of being out of your mind with fear and coming down off a tranquilizer. A lot of discourse about Atobe's transgression, a few rounds of contest and rebuttal, but eventually they announced this "sentence".  _Me_ , Choutarou, I heard them say this about  _me_  - I had to be killed. My heart cut out. Apparently this wasn't a new thing because it drew no immediate murmurs from the assembled group. I was petrified – maybe I thought that if I didn't move, they might forget I was there."   
  
My mind found itself on a sudden, reeling tangent. "I guess I know why I never told you all this. Now it's apparent. Just telling you 'I cheated on you' wasn't enough without the rest of the story, and the rest of the story is taking me back. I'd managed to block it all out, never think about it."   
  
"It's okay," Choutarou whispered, still in his pensive position by the computer, leaning toward me, "go on, baby, just…make it quick, like a band-aid or something."   
  
An ironic chuckle escaped when he said this. My head was pounding and I was clenching all my muscles, all my nerves, again. "They actually got far enough to cut my shirt off, and that knife was so close I felt it on my skin. But before they took my hood off – so they could have the satisfaction of seeing my face when it was done? I don't know – before they did that, this hand came out, and there was all this shouting. Now, Atobe hadn't said much up until now. He made…he made a good argument. I hadn't seen anyone's faces, I didn't know where I was. I hadn't really done anything wrong. Apparently he'd been watching me for all these months and I hadn't made move one to tell anyone about The Empire. He even talked about how I seemed like I was going to drop out of the academy, anyway. One thing I remember really well, here, is that another voice spoke up to say "If you do this – if you give him his way – I'm never coming back." And the guy who'd been talking the most said "Atobe. Are you willing to shoulder that burden?" Atobe's response was "I'll get you back.  _Emperor_." Now, they all called themselves by these code names – High Emperor, Wind Emperor – but this was the only time someone just said…Emperor. I don't know, it stuck with me, and I wondered about it a lot, because I didn't really want to think about my own impending death but I couldn’t resist trying to piece it all together in my mind. Especially recently. I still haven't been able to identify who that might have been, even with all our research."   
  
"Shishido." Choutarou had wheeled up close to me, and placed a hand on my knee.   
  
"Like a band-aid, right. More arguments, and I ended up in the back of a van again. It took about thirty minutes to get wherever we were going, but after I was kicked out of the back of the van and rolled into what smelled and felt like wet grass, I heard Atobe's voice and he was holding me by the sides of my hooded face. He didn't say anything deep and lyrical and well-rehearsed, all he offered me was a hard, hoarse "If you ever show your face near The Empire, ever again, you're  _mine_." He jerked my head back, grabbed the ponytail at the back of my head, and hacked through my hair over the course of a few minutes. He didn't even explain this, but all I needed was the force he put behind it. I'd almost cost him something important, and here he was taking yet another chance on me. Maybe there was something about taking my hair that still left me with something to "answer for" regarding the night's events. Leaving me some terror once again. I was instructed to wait five minutes before I took off my hood. I did – probably longer, just to be safe. Shaking, I threw up in the field where I'd been dumped, and then crawled my way to the highway. Once I found my footing, I started walking. I gained my bearings within an hour and was home by sunrise. I never spoke about it again, not to anyone. I tried not even to think about it, to myself."   
  
"And yet you took that case." Choutarou whispered, holding his own head in his hands. His voice came through in a filtered hiss.  
  
"What else would I have done?" I asked calmly. "The Empire finds out that Momoshiro Takeshi is on their trail. They trace his footsteps. They find us. I didn't come close to The Empire, but it sure as Hell came close to me. I couldn't help myself, I suppose. I could have lied, but I'm not that quick on my feet."   
  
Choutarou launched out of his chair, had his arms around me, and managed to drag me messily onto the floor, where he squeezed me in an embrace so tight that I could just barely breathe. "Let's just run. Let's just go off someplace they'll never find us."   
  
"You'd do that to our families?"   
  
"Shishido, think about everything you just told me! Everything you've been through!"   
  
"We've never dealt with pretty things. I guess now it's just time to take a gamble. My only hope is to get to Atobe Keigo before he gets to me. He was supposed to kill me in that field, I know he was."   
  
Choutarou breathed out, low and long, beside my ear. "I love you. Goddamnit I love you more than anything ever in this fucking world, and I'm gonna kill that sonofabitch for you."


	12. Ryoma

It wasn't good enough anymore. The last one had shown them only a fraction of what I knew I could do, satisfied though I had been with the fulfillment of my intent: complete accuracy, a murder by clockwork. But it was not exciting, it was not revolting, and it was no longer unexpected. That's why no one was talking anymore. Or perhaps they  _were_  talking, and that's what I pretended did not upset me. They were no longer hesitant to share details, not like before. No hush-hush, no turn of the head and "you don't want to know" when pressed. I wondered if my father was proud, if he was chronicling my progress somewhere and knew it was me. I wondered if he was preparing.  
  
My first victim had been a mad, hellish, slapdash concoction of bloodlust, and Tezuka asked me for the specifics because even Fuji didn't know them, couldn't knead them out of the servant who'd found the body or the Medical Examiner who'd confirmed the pieces and parts as belonging to Dr. Sakaki. There hadn't been any method or medium with him – I'd just killed, like a wild thing loosed from its cage for the very first time. Mixed media murder, flesh cut from bone and bones rendered hollow and hollows left desecrated. It wasn't refined or proper in any way – just a grotesquerie, just the memories and the madness coming out. That thing I was always able to control, coming out.   
  
Even now, I mastered it. I'd strayed from my territory in order to prove something to myself. I was no longer a little boy terrified in a dungeon, no, but I wasn't a killer beyond his means, either. This wasn't a point I was winning for Tezuka in his game against The Empire, and it wasn't a message delivered from Fuji. I lifted one foot and my sneaker made a squishing sound as it broke the barrier of blood surrounding it. The viscous stuff flowed into the one white spot left on the floor of the convenience store bathroom while I scratched the back of my calf with my toe. What would dad have said? That is, before he declared that this lesson was over and shut me up in my dungeon. No windows, no carpet, where occasionally I'd hear a sound like a woman on the verge of a corporeally devastating orgasm that turned into something more ghastly until the crescendo and climax of death. Lots of times, since he killed mom and no one found out, I heard this, but most of the time I watched it.   
  
It wasn't easy to track down a hitman working for The Heights. They were notoriously aware, endlessly shrewd and cautious. So I hadn't tracked him down at all. Rather, I'd been admiring him ever since, quite by chance, he'd started to frequent the Café du Ville during similar hours as I. At first I'd thought of the Jackal Kuwahara as a threat, and I'd been careful not to seem suspicious. He, on the other hand, made no such fuss. The boys from The Heights were out of their territory this far into town, though it made sense considering his partner, the one he waited around for, the one who came to this 'burg just for the colorful, nauseating nightlife. The Jackal had a hardened brand of confidence and charisma that I supposed came with being one of Yukimura's boys (or Sanada's…it was hard to keep track, at least Tezuka said so, considering what had happened last year. Things people referred to very properly: The Incident. That Unseemly Business. The Breakdown. The Diagnosis.). He wasn't any different under a knife. His teeth didn't look any different than anyone's else's, clinking together at the base of the sink with flecks of blood still between, the remains of a macabre cocktail. Perhaps they were whiter than most – he took good care of himself.  
  
He was dead now. I'd killed one of the four heavies on The Heights' payroll, and you'd think I would have been exhilarated by the whole thing. I stepped around carefully, examining my work. Evisceration had been easy. I'd done that before. This time I'd come prepared for it, though. Gloves, knives, the right tools for the job. Murders of passion were dealt by things that could be tracked – guns were the most notoriously unreliable partners in crime. They always talked, eventually. Murder by hand was a tricky business, too, and unless you were invisible to the world (as I had been), or intensely careful (as I had become), a good forensics team would find you. That's why murders by knife were so maddening to investigators, so chilling to the general populace even if they couldn't place why. Even murder by chainsaw (which I had witnessed, long ago) was less intrinsically fearful, just because it didn't require the intimacy of the blade. Me, I was armed with a Puukko knife anyone could buy if they just found the right online dealer, and I'd managed to gut, rend, and artistically reassemble a body with its aide. Knife work was quick work, once you knew what you were doing. I won't lie and say it didn't take me some weeks of practice, some more in-depth study of anatomy than a book can ever provide.   
  
**  
  
We tended to watch the same television shows on the same nights at the same time, regardless of reruns or commercials. At two o'clock in the morning you don't have much choice. Some nights we would commiserate in silence, and other nights we would talk over the television for an entire hour. I hadn't grown up with a TV set, and so it was intriguing to have it serving as a nightlight and a backdrop, chamber music of the twenty-first century like grease for engaging conversation. That night, particularly, I was exhausted and so was he, and we blinked silently at the flickering lights as they showed an old episode of some show he had tried encapsulating for me but I never remembered. As with many things, I gave up trying to understand and pretended from that point forward to know what was going on. I was perpendicular to him, scrunched up facing sideways, using his thigh as a pillow. It was his heat, or his stillness, or maybe just the familiarity of his scent and his breathing. Whatever it was, it calmed me. I told him, even insisted in our most heated debates, that I did indeed feel emotion, but if you try to explain to someone – if I try to explain to  _you_  for example, who has, in all likelihood, been raised in such a way to express feelings as part of your natural course – that you just didn't know what to do with them, there isn't much to it without a week-long psychiatric exhumation and a cadre of behavioral therapists backing me up.   
  
Things about Momo were soft, from the inner core of his personality to the shape of his body. I'd been with so many men that were hard and angular, and his cherubic qualities must have contributed to the comfortable way I felt. A commercial started and I flopped over, body twisting easily to stare up at him. He knew it was a silent cue to look at me, as well, and a few seconds passed before I said anything – one knee pointed up and swinging back and forth. A celebrity shill enthusiastically hocking a new sort of cell phone in the background. The world narrowed and centered in, and I made a pinched, curious expression, my voice twining up to that adolescent pitch I don't really mind:  
  
"You want a blow job?"  
  
We'd been living together for a good while at this point, and it was before I'd killed anyone, before I'd snapped into another version of the Ryoma he knew. I just waited for his answer, studied his shocked face, the way he seemed to choke on a laugh. Momo was not a liar.   
  
"Why would you say something like that?" It was an incredibly awkward moment, and he played at pushing a pillow into my face, trying to distract me from how I'd made him blush.   
  
I grabbed the pillow and tossed it on the floor. "I'm bored," I said flatly, and turned back around, limbs flowing about in the cushions again, until I was lying on my stomach, the curve of my neck nestled on the curve of his thigh. Face, mouth – way too close for his comfort, "it'd just be something to do."   
  
"No. It's not!" He scoffed, genuinely but gently affronted by my casual approach to the situation. I rolled my eyes as he went on. "It's not just a way to pass an evening. Now, maybe I've been sending the wrong signals, but…I'm sorry. I don't…"   
  
He trailed off in frustration at himself. The wrong signals? Yes. He was a tactile person, and it was so different from the people I was used to that I'd grown to like it, to like him. Being pushed aside in the kitchen, having my hair tousled, an arm thrown around my shoulders, a sleepy hug in the morning when Momo wanted something to rest against while the coffee was brewing up. The abundance of casual intimacy was a poor veil for his fear of actual intimacy, but that wasn't what interested me. I couldn't care less about it. I just liked being around someone who touched me and approached me as an equal without considering sex. My entire life, it seemed, for as long as I'd been alive as Ryoma On His Own, not as a beloved son with a doting mother, I'd been objectified and the forces of nature had dictated that I adapt to the polluted life I knew. Everyone was a predator, and it was safest to assume that they were after me. I'd never tell Momo. I could peer into a crystal ball and see that even years into the future he'd never know about how I'd learned to fight, that it had all been my father, a monster who was casually conducting a psychological experiment, dictating when he wanted me to ward off someone's advances or exercise the most base, street-tough forms of self-defense. He also dictated when he wanted me to lie back and take it, when it would have been lights out for a week in the room with no windows if I even made a sound out of turn. I still don't know if any of those people paid for what they got. All I know is that I was a lure – I was bait, but he was the bear.  
  
I laid face-down in Momo's lap and ignored his protests. I wasn't bait again. I'd read Nabokov and this wasn't conniving, this wasn't taking advantage of my roommate, drawing up a blackmail ledger without really knowing that in the end I was still the one being victimized. No, I just wanted to do something – tonight the fates dictated that it was something sexual. If that was called unnatural, I would have begged the arbiter's pardon. Despite my occupation and my history and my detachment from emotion, physical contentment was still something I knew and experienced.   
  
But I was still a kid, in so many ways, even though I was a hollowed-out, slash-and-burn, gutted version of a kid, a ghost with an angel face. Tezuka couldn't understand it, and he wanted plans and commitments and timetables. I was  _a kid_. It wasn't to say that sex with Tezuka wasn't a great thing – he wasn't overcautious, he wasn't over-talkative, he wasn't as boring as I might have pegged him at first sight. When I got the feeling that he'd developed feelings for me beyond a master/protégé arrangement, I had to move on. I moved on, and I moved in with Momo. Momo with the permanently disheveled hair, Momo with the genetically perfect complexion. Momo who let dishes pile up in the sink so I'd be the one to do them. Momo who may have been amazing behind closed doors, under the covers, or however else he wanted to make everything clandestine. But he was the first person I'd ever encountered, for a lengthy period of time, who wasn't my definition of normal.   
  
My definition of normal broke down into three essential traits, and it was how I knew My People, those who wouldn't criticize or hassle me. I'd been able to identify them early after I'd escaped. One, they were people who didn't take age into consideration as a prerequisite for wisdom, for life experience and mental hardening. Usually this meant they had been through a fair share of shit as well, but luckily my kind of people didn't talk about their shit just as I didn't drone on about mine. Two, they didn't form bonds, not like the overwhelming, suffocating majority. Bonds of convenience, yes, bonds of silent, shrewd understanding; but they knew that bonds didn’t come with guarantees and certificates and declarations and matching jewelry. All of that got mixed up into emotions, and I've explained already how bad I am with those things. Three, and perhaps most importantly, sex was a fact of life to my people, not an event or an endgame or a Special Moment. I couldn't even understand those who said it had that capability, because I couldn't wrap my brain around it. I lost my virginity when I was nine. For a long time I thought my father was murdering them to punish them, and that was until I learned a few more truths. A lot of psychologists will tell you that this sort of experience (though I can't imagine an experience like mine – imagine standing 4'8'' in a doorway, pajamas and bare feet, waiting until the drill died down, until the stomach of someone – someone sexual to you, now, however briefly – began to convulse in muscle revolt, pumping out blood through the precise hole with disgusting noise. Imagine suggesting that your father use the hacksaw instead of the electric one, just because it's your 'favorite'…then tell me about experience) will foster one of two extremes in the adult psyche. The first is similar behavior, a repetition of history, an attempt at salvation and understanding and cleansing by enacting the sins of one's abusers onto a new generation. The other is the hermit, the indefinite one, the worst enemy of oneself. Amorality, lack of emotion, inability to separate fantasy from reality – a lot of these things typify both "outcomes" of a case like mine (I still assert there are no cases like mine, though I'm sure there are. I just don't want to hear about them. My case is me, it's not some statistic. For fuck's sake…). I have a lot of all the traits, and bit of the rebellious ardor of the third, and oft-times most common, abuse survivor "type". That's the type most boring to me, though. That's the type romanticized by the mass media, by pop culture. Want a quick and easy explanation for why a teenager (or even adult) is promiscuous, violent, and mentally disturbed? Try abuse on for size! Try childhood trauma! It's a great plot device. Cut it. Print that. Fuck Hollywood.  
  
Momo leaned his head back and I couldn't have ever explained to him that I liked sucking cock because I was good at it, I liked being a whore because I was good at it. I was good at other things, too, and this is before I realized I was good at killing people without really trying… but if I had the choice to give my roommate, the only person I knew who was genuinely kind and had no ulterior objective with me, an explosive orgasm instead of an out-of-practice guitar solo, I'd pick the more vivid of the two talents. He was the one teaching me guitar, anyway. That wouldn't impress him.   
  
**  
  
We had things similar to work orders at The Academy – they were printed like little calling cards, and after I'd killed Sakaki I was sure I was out of a job. I heard that Tezuka sometimes sent boys to die. These were urban legends only known to the very select flesh-peddler demographic of our city and its surrounding area, but unlike most of those campfire stories it was very, very real. My next assignment came to my P.O. Box printed in red ink instead of black. I called Tezuka and asked him what had happened.   
  
"You're the first one who's ever fought back, you know, fought back and won."   
  
I nodded on the other end before I remembered it was a cell phone and he couldn't see me. "Uh-huh."   
  
Tezuka was never put off by my lack of emotion. He seemed similarly retrenched from that obligation to humanity of showing his feelings. Momo had just learned to deal with it, but Tezuka and I were simpatico in one regard at least. Whether he had any skeletons, I didn't know and didn't care. He was normal, to me. "There's a favor I'd like to ask of you. I'd like to ask you to kill the clients whose names come to you in red, from now on."   
  
"Why?" I wasn't repelled by the idea, not really. Probably because I already knew that I'd never get caught because I derived no satisfaction from killing, and passion is usually what does a serial murderer in. But I did want to know Tezuka's motive for making me his right hand.   
  
"Frankly, I'm getting tired of my arrangement. I'll deal in my own way with the blood that's already on my hands, but I'd like it to stop now," he paused. I could hear him sipping tea, but very primly, "the client's name in red has requested a victim, and instead I'm sending you. Do you agree, Echizen?"   
  
My last name. I hated it when he used my last name, but it did certainly get my attention. "I agree to do it, even if I don’t agree with the ethics. You owe me an explanation, though. About the boys who've died."   
  
"Feeling judicious?"   
  
"Just curious. Mostly about the ones who kill them."   
  
"Very well, then. Do your job and you'll be compensated in information."   
  
I was bait again. But this time I was the hook as well. It felt a bit empowering, and I think I reached the pinnacle of my game when I used everything my father had taught me about concealment and calm and trickery to my advantage against the insufferable redhead. I was chastised, but only slightly, for letting his lover go. Tezuka concluded his moderate harangue by saying that things would be more interesting with Oshitari alive, anyway. At that point I was learning about the Empire, and I was learning about Fuji. I witnessed them together, but only once. And by together I don't mean in the Biblical sense (an ironic way to put it, I know). Tezuka wouldn't have that, and without even being told, I could garner why. Fuji was like a chill wind in that mansion, but he grew warmer as he got closer. I didn’t like him because I knew that Tezuka still threw him the scraps. Fuji didn't like me because he saw an obvious rival. We were congenial enough, but in all my hypocritical glory, I couldn't stand to be around killers.   
  
He stole Mizuki from me, killed him right under my nose, because of something he called honor and love.  
  
I'll talk more about Yuuta later.  
  
Since then, it had been going downhill. One, two, three more members of The Empire, and I asked Tezuka why the well was going dry if this organization was as hyperbolic as it was touted to be. "A lot have fled, actually. Looks like everything might be working."   
  
"Then why not go after the leaders?"   
  
"Fuji's one of them. And we're not touching the other."   
  
"Why not?" I had a little plush mouse puppet I'd bought at the bookstore, and I was leaning over the back of the big chair, in front of Tezuka's desk. That puppet was gesturing and speaking for me. I wasn't using any cartoony voice, though I was in a good mood and was smiling more than usual. "It'll just get big again, and believe it or not I don't want to do this into my twenties."  
  
Tezuka didn't smile, but I could tell the puppet was amusing him on the most absurdist level. "I've made promises to myself."   
  
"Intrigue, I like it," I positioned the mouse in front of my face, kicking one leg back and leaning forward even more. The chair tilted with me a little. My weight was hardly enough to topple it, "is this the tragic love story I'll never know about?"   
  
"Ryoma." Tezuka snapped quietly, grabbing the puppet from my hand and then offering it to me like some mercy-killed thing. I pouted, smartened up, and realized the fun was over.  _Oh, that's right,_  I thought,  _I'm the last person who should really talk to Tezuka about that._  At the same time that I exercised my decorum, however, I was thinking that it wasn't my fault he had pederast tendencies, with romantic overtones I couldn't have handled even if he was my type. Even if I had a type.  
  
He dismissed me from his office. Two weeks passed and I realized that, as well as I'd succeeded in fighting the passion for blood, I hadn't been able to escape a need for perfection. I wasn't working, I was killing again, and I was wondering where my father was.  
  
**  
  
Momo was still talking, and I was trying to stop thinking. I opened my eyes in the way that I knew to open them in situations like these – they felt heavy, like I was hooding them, but I wasn't. Not really. My brow was low and I was glaring up. Making my most effective bedroom eyes aged me by about four years and made me feel like I was accessing some soul-binding psychic cortex. Momo stopped his babbling when I raked two fingers on the inside of his thigh, and covered his face with both hands. In a signal of silent capitulation he tilted his head back, and then broke the silence by making a noise like some wild animal cornered and trying to be ferocious in the face of its own demise. Those were his ethics vocalizing themselves, I supposed.   
  
He was coming in less than ten minutes, and that was under the guidance of my best efforts to draw things out. He stammered my name and felt the need to announce it, which I suppose was kind of him. It had probably been a while since Momo had gotten laid, if his conversation was any indication, and beyond that he'd probably had girlfriends who'd smacked him if he didn't. He was relying on conditioning and habits he barely remembered while the heat of the moment fried his other mental functions. Now, any self-respecting person really doesn't like having someone else ejaculate in their mouth, with or without warning. Warning helped. I hated it. Usually. But with Momo it was sort of different – I don't know, it was sweet, in a way. His voice didn’t ruin the mood, like most. Mood?, you may be asking, I was trying to capture a mood? Yes, for your information, I was. I wanted sex to be a black hole, a space of action in which there was no sound, no emotion, and no removing oneself from the ride until it had come to a complete stop.   
  
I guess I'd fucked that up big time, because Momo was crying. Not bawling, mind, not completely devoid of his pride. But he was snuffling back something and swatting at his eyes. Usually I didn't give a rat's ass if my lovers lost their minds completely, as long as it didn't concern me. Now, here, I couldn't avoid it. We lived together. I still had to remind him that we needed dish soap.   
  
"Sorry." I mumbled, the word sounding very foreign and affected because to me, it was. I pulled back up into a sitting position with my knees still up, and wiped my face with my wrist. I supposed it wouldn't have been couth to note for Momo that I hadn't missed a drop. As they say.   
  
"Hey, now. No. It's not, it wasn't…" He was speaking in sentence fragments, communicating with them the power of his larger idea which failed at every attempt to be articulated. A deep breath, and he did up his jeans. Momo seemed to splay his entire being out, from his limbs to his already protracted silence, sinking down into the couch. I didn't respond and didn't prompt him to elaborate. I got what he was saying.   
  
Another show has started on the television – 'Maude'. I remembered that one, because I actually found it funny. I allowed Momo his deflating time and felt the tightness of so much unspoken tension pulling at pieces of me like tenterhooks. I turned against the armrest and scrunched up until I could feel my breath on my knees. I fingered for the remote control and turned up the volume without looking. Bea Arthur cracked a joke that made me sort-of laugh, and Momo shifted to stand up. I looked over, remembering my training and keeping my eyes at his shoulders and never above. It wasn't good to look him in the eye right then.  
  
He walked past and clapped a hand on my knee. "Goodnight."  
  
There. Just like it had never happened. Part of me had logically expected that, and the more terrible side had hoped for it. He shook out his legs on the way to the stairwell, paused, and turned around with one hand on the wall. I tensed for a remark that would snap those tenterhooks taut, but instead –  
  
"Hey, are we out of dish soap?"   
  
"Yeah. We are."   
  
"I'll get some tomorrow."   
  
"Cool. Night."   
  
"G'night."  
  
**  
  
The truth, you see, is that I was nervous. Not nervous that I would get caught for any of my numerous illegalities – never that – but that I found myself, more and more every day and night, wanting to slake my desire for normalcy by slaking my desire for Momo. The night I followed The Jackal into a convenience store bathroom and made art of his innards was the day after Momo brought home that boyfriend of his. It wasn't like I could fault Yuuta or anything. He was a nice guy. He had  _present_  issues, not past ones, and I couldn't imagine myself going through his as easily as he probably couldn't imagine having gone through mine. Yuuta was nothing like me. He was sweetly assertive, he was responsive, he was engaging and just self-effacing enough to be a perfect accessory to someone like Momo, who lived to make people feel better. I felt my father's voice crawl inside of my head like a parasite –  _he's better than me, he deserves Momo, he deserves something normal._  
  
"Shut up!" I finally shouted at the mirror, rethinking my first instinct to punch it. I didn't want any of my blood at this crime scene, not that I was on file anywhere I knew of. They'd probably presumed me dead along with my mother, for all I knew. But that would mean the police still had a file on me. I thought quickly enough to stay my fist. I'd even been cautious enough to clean up the blood I'd left in Oshitari's Yuushi's place, so why fuck up here? I bared my teeth at my reflection, instead, and realized how unthreatening I was in an actual agitated state. My calm was scads more intimidating. Also, I realized how far over the edge I'd gone.   
  
It became crystal clear as I clutched the tightly-sealed plastic bag containing my change of clothes and walked out of the door and into the trees outside the store. Darkness in front of me and around me and inside of me.   
  
I didn't want to be killing people, but there wasn't any better way to practice.   
  
I had to stop killing. I had to find my father.   
  
I was already doing unspeakable things to nice people – he had to die before something happened to Yuuta, before something happened to Momo. I changed my clothes, chucked the soiled ones over the bridge on the way to the Café du Ville, and set out to sort out my thoughts.   
  
There was a sign on the café door:   
  


CLOSED  
EMERGENCY  
WILL RE-OPEN ASAP  
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE

  
  
Every time, I worried that I'd leave my cell phone in my bloody pants, but I never failed to swap it to the new pocket. Tezuka was on speed dial. "What happened at the café?" I asked, a bold tone still choking my voice a little.   
  
"Well, thank God it wasn't you, I can tell you that. Seems like one of the guys who lived there had a run-in with the leader of The Empire."  
  
"Atobe Keigo." I remembered the name like sailors remember the lash. It sounded too sweet on my lips to belong to  _him_. "Who's dead?"  
  
Tezuka sighed at me, through me. He had no idea what I'd done. "Go home, Ryoma. As far as I'm concerned, this is all over."  
  
I clenched my fist and clenched my teeth and didn't hang up the phone.   
  
"Ryoma?"  
  
"There's something I want you to help me to do, and then we part ways. Understood?"   
  
He thought about it for a few moments. It sort of gutted him, I was certain. "Understood."  
  
Atobe hadn't been killed. I would have heard that in Tezuka's voice.


	13. Oshitari

For the first week or so, I had been numb, and so I didn’t care. Whatever he wanted: that was fine, Atobe. I was the walking dead, in hiding, and I had nowhere else to turn. To say my best friend was a different person would be an understatement, but for the adjustment period I didn't even notice. His idea of rehabilitation was nihilism as recovery. Decadence. Wasting away in a nerverending stream of sex and drink and drugs. Not the sort of perpetual motion I'd come to expect, not the round-the-house toolings of a jetset playboy with an overactive sensual cortex. Atobe had turned passive but somehow all the more emboldened for it. I heard about what had happened at the most recent Empire meeting and I knew it. He was a changed man, and what could I do except blame it on the boy?   
  
It was about a month before I really started feeling again, but it was a different way, a different form of feeling. Cabin fever from being in the same old mansion for so long, without human contact, without sunlight. I felt like a ghoulish reincarnation of my own self – the self that had existed before Gakuto - had come back to life like a phoenix of a fever dream. Hard-drinking, hard-thinking, hard-hearted. Like there wasn't a shred of romance left in me – that's how the newly-Bohemian Atobe began to describe the way I acted. But in fact, I had a keener sense of romance than ever before. All the greatest tragedies of our time – think of Shakespeare, think of Bronte, think of Puccini – are rooted in romance. It makes you insane and it makes you desperate. For my part, it made me pull the prettiest knife out of Atobe's cutlery collection and stand over the bed at around 7:00 a.m. when the master and his ward had already fallen asleep (usually), draped across each other (usually) and naked to my vengeful eyes.   
  
No, it wasn't fair. Not a bit of it was fair. Atobe had someone now, someone who wasn't me. The someone he'd always wanted, after I'd pried myself from his influence to be with my own. Gakuto had always been like a rare pet to Atobe, a novelty item that was as odd as it was beautiful, which annoyed him only because he couldn't have one for himself. All he'd had to do was keep waiting, and now he had his own precious toy. Like a jealous child who had the added bonus of bonded bourbon fueling his resentment, I wanted to break Atobe's special thing. I'd planned it all out, over those early mornings, knife in hand. How he'd wake up on bloody 1200 count cotton sheets and I'd be there, no explanations, no allowance for a period of mourning.   
  
I wanted him back, and it was his own fault that he'd let me into his home during this fragile time. It didn't help that, despite what I saw as major flaws in his adoptive character, I found the bastard more attractive than ever. It was in the way he didn't seem to care anymore, parading finally for his own sake and not the rest of the world's. It came from observing him, and his interactions with the boy. There Atobe would be, sitting contently in his big easy chair, wearing the reading glasses he'd never really worn before, for fear of ever being seen as a flawed human being. The book in his hand would disappear as the boy walked by, and in a few silent, authoritative moves, he would have a lover in his lap with a hand down his pants. It all played out like the boy was trained for it, and jubilant to be so – just Atobe's sleepy, speechless fuck slave. Watching more closely proved me wrong. It would be by chance, some nights, that I'd wander through the parlor and hear the harmony of his higher register with Atobe's deeper one, unintelligible vibrations of a conversation, punctuated by actual laughter. Those moments made my ears burn and my fist tighten more than seeing them in bed together ever would.   
  
Atobe called me silly, of course, if I even touched on the intensity of my hostile leanings. He'd coax the drink from my hand and distract me with himself for a good few hours, but some feelings are indelible regardless of how many blowjobs are exchanged and orgasms are rendered. He said he still loved me, but he had a looser tongue when he was wasted, stoned, and especially both. I didn't recall him ever having said "I love you" before Gakuto had been killed.  
  
There's a wound that won't close up, right there. I'd try to cover it up, but it bleeds right through. Why not just air it out, make myself a festering mess for everyone to see? I could never go back to my own home. I didn't know what became of Gakuto's body. Atobe wouldn't tell me, if he knew anything. I'd loved someone, and I'd loved my life, and my punishment for so much bloodlust wasn't waiting in the afterlife, it was right here. More painful than all of that, though, perhaps, was knowing that I'd loved myself, something I couldn't foresee doing anytime in the near future.  
  
We were the twisted metal, flames, and flesh of a car crash, made to live in one house and wonder about the next step, but not if we could help it. Some nights, things seemed almost bearable. With Atobe's head in my lap, we recounted our exploits and reminisced about the good old days of The Empire. The boy was sleeping, and we'd brought out the fine spirits.   
  
"See, that's where I just don't get you," he breathed into my thigh while I played with his hair, "eating people. So much mess involved in your work."   
  
"Not if you do it right. And I don't think I'll keep up the eating people part. Now that Gakuto's gone, it's not the same."   
  
"So it was sort of like bonding time with you two? Cannibalism?"   
  
"I don't take a piss on everything you do, so shut the fuck up if you've never tried it."   
  
He turned around a little, as much as he could, and rolled his hips until he was in a quasi-comfortable position staring up at me. Moments like these, I could be licking his back with my cock up his ass if I wanted, but I was enjoying the reprieve of the rare conversation for what it was. His eyes went a little wild as he said, softly: "Maybe I want to try it."   
  
"Who are we going to kill, you headcase?"  
  
"You've made someone deep-throat a butcher knife before. I haven't. Headcase. Yeah right. I just mean…I do want to try it. If the situation ever presents itself again."  
  
"Have you missed it? Killing?" I looked at the far wall and mumbled, leaning a cheek on my fist and running my fingers over Atobe's chest. I ignored his headcase rebuttal. He was right; we were both crazy in our own ways, both to certain unfathomable extents.   
  
"I'd say it's driving me crazy, but that's sort of granted, isn't it? It's not easy at all."   
  
I had weaseled myself into the position of asking it, and so I hoped it didn't sound affected when I said: "Well what about him, then?"   
  
"What about him." Atobe knew what I was going for, and if a work crane had lifted my hand from his body it would've been less subtle than the way his entire countenance changed, obviously not wanting me to touch him in that moment.  
  
"Well, I did expect it. I did say I told you so. What good is he, then? Don't tell me you don't want to take your time on that throat…"   
  
"Say anything more about Jirou and I'll cut your dick off, I swear. And you know I don't like knives."   
  
"I know you don't like knives."   
  
"Which is why I can tell that you've been going through mine." His tone turned nonchalantly accusatory, and his gaze went dark and probing. "Either you're cutting up a lot of vegetables that I never see, or something else is going on."   
  
Unruffled, I glanced down and let out a tiny chuckle. "So much for ever doubting your powers of perception. How wildly sexy, calling me out like that."   
  
"Well, I do try. Don't do it anymore, okay? Stop it with the knife, it's fucking creepy. And don't ever forget, you're a guest here. I've done what I can to bring you through this, and now you'll just have to help yourself. No killing Jirou, no playing at killing Jirou, and no asking why I haven't killed Jirou yet."   
  
No surprise that he'd probably been pretending to sleep one night, just to save the ammunition of his knowledge for later. "Have you ever been through it, Atobe? You entitled prick. Try losing someone, then we'll talk about how I can and cannot handle my own grief."   
  
I was flip but firm with him, and the conversation still managed to play out normally. "Threatening to chop up my lover for breakfast crosses a fucking line."   
  
"So what is he, to you, exactly? Just a lover?"   
  
He groaned, and overdramatically closed his eyes while pouting. "Ohhh, can we stay off of that topic?"   
  
"Fuck you we can. You say you love me—"   
  
"I  _do_  love you, my god, what do you want from me?" It was sometimes fun to catch him at a disadvantage, but it just made it harder in the long run of the confrontation. Atobe had the power to whine and wheedle his way out of most things. I'd just throw him on the area rug and start tearing his clothes off if he got too mouthy.   
  
"Why would you say you love me? Is it just a seniority thing? I've been in your life longer? He gets to share your bed. He's the one who seems to have changed your life. I don't like the concept of people falling in love with their victims."   
  
He was scowling and speechless for a moment, and conceded to that much. "Okay, fine, understood on that aspect. But even though you don't like it, can't you understand it? You scare him, Yuushi. I'd invite you to bed with us but you come on a little strong, if you don't mind my saying."   
  
I opened my mouth to respond, actually pleased that the spat was distracting me from my usual pity-party, when the doorbell rang. The doorbell never rang.  
  
"Don't get it." I said after a moment. If I never answered a doorbell for the rest of my life, it would be too soon. I'd been over all those details with Atobe, and as he raised up halfway from my lap, most of his body still sprawled sumptuously where it wasn't twisted unnaturally, a spark of uncharacteristic fear was flickering in his eyes.  
  
"Yeah. Let it go."   
  
The bell rang again. We stayed uneasily silent, and he took my hand – really held it, until I had to squeeze his tighter just to ebb my nerves. "How did someone get past the gate?" He whispered, as if the walls were bugged, as if the person on the doorstep were close enough to hear us. "If they got past the gate, why come right up to the front door?"   
  
"For you, Atobe, I'd assume people might go to a lot of audacious lengths." I tried to calm myself by playing the humorous one, but then he clutched at the sleeve of my shirt and his voice broke just a little bit. He was slightly drunk, and consistently buzzed these days to the point of paranoia.  
  
"I don't want to die. All these years…and we're still so young. We had everything, and we still do," the doorbell, once more, and Atobe's voice hitched up like someone poised at the noose with nothing left to lose from an execution confessional, "I want to retire, Yuushi. Take you with me, to the Island. No more Empire, no more of this city. I'm sick of it, and I just want to go."   
  
"Would you still kill?" I wasn't focusing on the fact that it could be nothing – it could be Family come to impart some news or some unfortunate new development.  
  
"To be honest with you…I don't know how I couldn't."   
  
I wanted to let the gravity of what he was saying sink in, the measure of his candor and what it must have taken for him to admit such a thing to me, to even show a shade of his human layer filled with fear and mortality. I wanted to ask him how he intended to do that…to kill…on the Island. It made me wary to go there with him, to even entertain his idea. But he was known for delusions of grandeur, and maybe this was another one of those.   
  
I was trying to convince myself, even as the gunshot made us both stiffen, and then bolt up and off of the sofa. He yelled at me if I knew what the fuck that was, and I yelled back that I had no idea.   
  
"Go upstairs, go upstairs!" He pointed, and I hesitated for a moment or two. "Go!" He snarled, and it was at that moment I saw it in his eyes. Fuck, maybe he did care. Maybe he was trying to protect me. Nothing like an industrial-sized shock to the system in the throes of crisis to show a person's true colors. I scrambled up the stairwell, half-obscured by the thick bannister and the slanting ceiling, as he approached the foyer. I could still see most of what was happening. My adrenaline was pumping again, and it felt amazing. I was alive again, even if I was scared out of my mind. Not out of my common sense, thankfully. I heard a shouting match taking place in the east wing, where the bedrooms and library and terrace landings were. There was a clamor, and a few muted whines of discomfort, and the next thing I knew I saw, from my bird's-eye view, was Atobe hauling Jirou into the room, by the collar. He tossed him across the floor of the den with a strength I'd only heard stories of Atobe having, and spoke so that his voice filled the room.   
  
A gun was in his right hand.  
  
"While I am, I'm sure, touched by your inept  _attempt_  to fashion yourself into some sort of defender of this household, the general rule is that  _we don't fucking let people get away._  Shit.  _Shit!_ " He hauled back his foot in preparation for a swift kick, and Jirou curled into a little ball. Atobe stopped himself, and grabbed his own face as a growl of frustration turned him literally around. He came back into place pointing at Jirou, then up at me. Not with the gun, at least. "Pack up. Pack your things, all that you can fit in what you have to fit it in. Or don't pack anything, I don't care. We're leaving. Tonight."  
  
Atobe kept four guns in his home that I knew of. He hated the things, hated the detachment from violence that they represented, but wanted the quick and easy if it ever came down to it. One gun was in his bedroom, and one was in his library. Either of those, Jirou could have gotten to. I didn't recognize the one Atobe was holding, but I was ambivalent about firearms and so I wouldn't have been able to tell which it was.  
  
"I swear I thought I got him, Atobe. I did…I know how to use a gun, and he…it's just…"   
  
"You're lucky you weren't killed!" The irony in those words was stunning. He hadn't paid me much mind. I was draped a bit on the stairwell, wondering if this was just another one of Atobe's flights of impulse and whether he would actually go so far as to charter a jet at 2:00 a.m. with no designs to return. Jirou was still trying to explain what had happened in a series of desperate whimpers, and I caught snippets of what he meant. In the wash of reality that was those minutes, I hated the boy a lot less. Apparently the man he'd shot at didn't know him, but had come to kill him anyway. Jirou had bruises, and was moving funny, and it wasn't from the hauling around Atobe had given him. I wanted to know more about this vigilante that now knew more than he should. If I didn't smell the coconut-saltwater smell of the Island, I smelled the musty hollow of a courtroom, and another trial that would end far less gracefully than my own.   
  
"Listen, how it happened is inconsequential! We can't stay here. This house, this city. Get up. Get up, stop looking like I hate you suddenly. You fucked up, but we have to get out." Atobe thinned out his lips and scratched the back of his neck with the gun. Fidgeting all over the place. It was so unlike him. He was pretending, in the heat of a confusion he'd never had, to have it all under control. But his body language gave him away. Always did. I brought one knee up to my chest and still didn't move. I don't think he could see me, even though he knew I was there.   
  
I'd fine out soon enough that, no, he couldn't. And it would make all the difference in the world, in our lives, forever.  
  
I watched Jirou pick himself up, limp a little on his left leg, and mutter something to Atobe (who was, believe it or not, concerned) about his knee having been beaten pretty bad. I watched him walk toward the doorway to the library and stop just short of there. He turned halfway around and looked a little shameful, very humbled. "I'm sorry I just screwed it all up for everyone."   
  
Everyone. He meant me, too. So we were in this together. I immediately lost the desire to gut him.   
  
"Go pack up." Atobe said, firmly but softly, quite adamant about not hurting the boy emotionally, not salving the wounds he'd procured from trying to help with a salt rub. He kicked one foot around his other and spun around, and that's where an interesting thing happened. I guess, after so much has happened, after your cerebral functions have been a live wire for long enough, things simply stop affecting you. I tensed and nearly lurched into possible view when I heard the cocking of another gun, when I saw Jirou start walking backwards into the room with his hands raised just slightly above his waist. I caught my breath and pushed myself into the shadows as much as I could.   
  
Atobe just looked over his shoulder, played with the safety of his automatic, and stared. There was no expression on his face at all. There was that blank sort of look he'd had all through high school until he'd met Tezuka Kunimitsu. Rich brat ennui. It appeared that the new intruder holding a gun to Jirou's throat and walking him into the den was nothing more than an annoyance to Atobe.   
  
"Well, if he'd told me it was  _you…_ "   
  
He was dark haired, on the shorter side, and wore suspenders in a way that was just evocative enough to be allowed. He looked like Sam Spade. "It wasn't. He did, however, leave the door open. Kaidoh gave him quite a fight."   
  
"You know the thug who had the balls to ring my doorbell?"   
  
Sam Spade chuckled darkly. "If only. No, all this wasn't so beautifully planned. I just know him. Of him, really."   
  
Atobe didn't really know what to say, I could tell, but I could also sense the tension in the room that went beyond the pointed gun. That look on Atobe's face. Jirou wondering why all this banter wasn't getting him anywhere, wondering why the two were talking as easily and poisonously as if they'd met at a party five years after chancing to ruin one another's lives.   
  
Oh.   
  
Oh, so this was the boy from the meeting. The one that had nearly gotten Atobe kicked out. That was before my time, by only a few months, but…oh.   
  
"You can't be serious, showing back up here with a threat, Shishido."   
  
"No. You saved my life. I get that. But you also made it a living Hell, and I'm afraid I have obligations beyond that."   
  
"What are those obligations? Pray. Tell."   
  
"A case. I've been charged with finding out who and where The Empire is. Names, locations, that sort of thing."   
  
"You work for Tezuka?"   
  
"Hardly. And that's all you're getting out of me."   
  
Atobe sounded almost mournful: "You know you won't get out of here alive."   
  
"Well, what makes you think the same about yourself?" Shishido. That was his name. It rang a bell, now. Very, very hushed whispers had passed around The Empire regarding this boy. He was Atobe's aesthetic type, if Atobe's aesthetic type was basically the antithesis of me: small in stature, striking with his eyes, a little bit world-weary for what must have been an age not prone to world-weariness, and above all that fresh. Shishido may have been trying to hide it, but he was just like Jirou, just like Tezuka in the fact that he exuded a chaste and naïve quality for all his posturing. This I deduced quickly, but I liked to deduce entire stories, entire histories, in the few minutes I usually had before I drove something sharp into places it shouldn't go. "Atobe." He sort of shrugged, but kept his gun trained like a professional. That's right, I reminded myself, he was. "You've fallen off of your usual radar, you know. But you've cropped up on all new ones. The Empire is dissolving. The survivors have either re-aligned themselves, fallen of the face of the Earth, of headed for The Heights, for Sanada. I suppose that doesn't really count as re-aligning, does it, because he was the first and rightful Emperor, wasn't he? And yet…he refuses to help you. Ask me how I know this."   
  
"These phone lines are secure," Atobe's voice was rising; his buttons were being mashed, "there's no way your two-bit operation could—"   
  
"Mmm, you'd like to think so. But, in fact, if your records are any indication – and I think they are – you're trying to curry his favor. Again. After losing it over…oh, I forget, would you remind me now? That's right. He quit The Empire because you were the spoiled brat who was able to get away with sparing  _my_  life. To be honest, Atobe, he makes you look like a pussy-cat. I'm scared of him. It's just a matter of time before this assassin starts to focus on The Heights and it all comes full circle. You're leader of an Empire that doesn't exist anymore, Atobe. It's all back in Sanada's hands. It's obvious why you're calling him. No one else trusts you anymore. Maybe it was all a ploy by Tezuka Kunimitsu, have you even taken the time over these last few months to consider that? All your allies, one by one, snuffed out? Everyone who was willing to put up with your entitled drama?"   
  
"Then what about the mole, Shishido? It was all—"   
  
"Fuji. Tezuka. Tezuka. Fuji. Let it sink in. Let it make sense. There, you have a gun right in your hand. Feel free to put it to your own head in the literal sense, because that's what you've already done." Jirou whimpered and lurched. Shishido grabbed him, quick as a cat, and pulled him back against his body. He was holding the gun directly beneath Jirou's chin, now, pressed against his throat. I wasn't Atobe, but I could understand the way he was feeling.   
  
Betrayed didn't begin to cover it. Shamed was an almost playful term. Atobe was in the middle of a personal crisis, trying to come to terms with the fact that he'd devoted some of the best years of his life to not even being aware of the grand masterwork being crafted by his One True Love. That's why I'd always called it bullshit. Even if I was suspect to believe it, I'd much rather hear I Love You from Atobe than hear it misappropriated to Tezuka.   
  
"Why this way?" He pointed the gun shakily at Shishido, and shouted. "Why did he do it this way, then? He could've killed me, he could've at least done it that easily! Why did everyone else have to die for it? What does it prove, what is the fucking  _point_  of all of this? He knows I'll never work here again…I'll never be able to show my face in society, I'll never…oh god…"   
  
"Atobe. It's revenge."   
  
"Why are you here, Shishido? I am where I am. I'm retired now. The minute Jirou shot at a hitman, I was retired."   
  
"Serial killers don't retire, Atobe. I'm the criminology major."   
  
"It won't do any good to do me in."   
  
"It will. Unless you off yourself first, it will be the end of the entire sordid mess. Tezuka gets his revenge, a boy gets to grow up, and this city might just start sleeping a little easier, even if it's just the whores and the nightcrawlers who need to worry. You sort of come to learn that they have hearts, as well."   
  
"I told them from the beginning…" Atobe was teetering in and out of lucidity, sanity, now, "told them it was Tezuka. And Sakaki was hesitant to believe me, but it was always Fuji…Fuji who…oh my god…"   
  
"Part of me wants you to show weakness right now, Atobe, but what will that make this boy here think?"   
  
"You let him go, Shishido. He means everything right now."   
  
"Care to elaborate?" Shishido cocked his head a little to the side, and then turned the question on Jirou's ear. "What does he mean by that?"   
  
"He's the…" he choked. Almost looked like he was going to throw up, but swallowed it back and let the words crackle out, "he's the one who saved me." Steady as a vise he lifted his gun, hammer down.  
  
"Not enough. He didn't do enough."   
  
Atobe's voice was a drastic, even rumble. "Fuck Tezuka Kunimitsu. Fuck whoever wants to see The Empire fall with me. It's already fallen – fuck it. I won't kill you, Shishido, I promise I won't kill you. But you did make an agreement with me."   
  
"Yes. I've been wondering for years, exactly what you meant by that. 'You're mine', you said. No word about death or revenge or some horrible fate, but just enough to terrify me. Well, here I am, Atobe. What's it going to be?"  
  
I should have been more suspicious than I was, but I have to admit that shock was the order of the night.  
  
"You're leaving with me tonight. With us. You're coming to the Island and we'll stay there until we mend fences with Sanada and have a safe place to go. Maybe longer than that. You're mine, in every sense you can imagine. I don't know why I didn't kill you in that field."   
  
"What was your reasoning at the time, at least?"   
  
He choked again, but his arm didn't even shiver. "I fell for you. Never for your neck."   
  
And for the first time, I really understood the poetry behind Atobe's madness. He kept four guns in his house. I was a pretty good shot, even if I didn't know the things by brand name. I pushed myself up the stairs, as a silence took over in the den, and my heart was the only thing I could hear as I took extra-special pains to not make a sound. Upstairs. The carpet of the landing. Third room. The guest study. The drawer was never locked. The box was never locked. He locked up his good liquor but not his guns. I managed to make it backwards onto the carpeting, and kept to all four until I reached the room. I was terrified that the sound of my foot steps would carry downstairs, or that the floorboards would creak under my weight. It was an old mansion, very old, and things like that were prone to happen. In the darkness punctuated only by moonlight I made my way to the lower left-hand drawer and opened it.   
  
Inside the seemingly small leather case was a Beretta. I lost my balance just a little bit in my kneel, decided "fuck it", and ended up on my feet. I wasn't, I am not, an easily frightened indivual. It might be argued that I have nerves of steel, all told, but something about this situation was making my knees tighten up, and then weaken. It was probably panic, I convinced myself. It was probably like that dream Gakuto always talked about having, where he had no choice but to run and his body never wanted to cooperate.   
  
Slowly. Slowly. Slowly. I crept around the mantle of light on the precipice of the stairwell and came down sideways. I'd have to cock the gun in plain sight – no way to do it without giving away my position. Why did they make the damned things so noisy? I knew why we all hated guns – all of us, every member of The Empire. Except Mizuki. Mizuki had liked guns, but he'd liked fucking Shuusuke Fuji's little brother a whole lot more. I had to agree with Atobe, at last. I wanted out of all this. I'd put a hole in Sam Spade's kneecap if it came to it.  
  
Maybe it was protecting Atobe. Maybe it was because, in a really secret way someone with my talent for non-expression would never let on, I wanted to drag him to the Island and…  
  
The party had grown, downstairs. I thought back on days at Atobe's, when the same happened in far less dire cicumstances. "I'm only coming to this thing if you'll stay with me all night, because I hate these things and if I'm not talking to you I don't have a reason to make a fool out of myself." I'd leave the room for five minutes, I'd come back, and Atobe would invite me over to meet six of his "friends" I had no interest in meeting, like it didn't bother me at all.   
  
He was an asshole. But when I saw a gun to his head it made me drag the deep and polluted river of my heart to dredge up the love that I had for him.  
  
Tall, platinum-headed, and looking like he had an even better command of firearms than Atobe did, I was completely oblivious as to the stranger's identity. So I just walked right down the stairs and took careful aim at his back – high enough to wound his dominant shoulder, to miss his heart and his artery and all his vitals. Massive tissue damage, probably a shattered bone. I would take him down.   
  
"Chouta-kun," Shishido noticed me and his tone went dreadful and careful. This was someone he cared for, "don't move."   
  
"You underestimate the people who might still be rooting for me, Shishido. I may be very, very damaged, but I'm not broken yet. This looks like a stalemate to me."   
  
"What should I do?" Shishido's partner (at least I assumed they were partners – lovers, beyond that, but how could I not assume that with the looks that were passing from Shishido's face in his direction?) asked strongly, readjusting the distribution of weight in his hips. He never took his eyes off of Atobe.   
  
This was one of those movie moments. I was almost disappointed in the sappy way that Shishido's eyes glossed over with chivalrous concession, the way he pulled his gun back and set the safety. He looked past his partner and at me. "We'll leave. Don't hurt him."   
  
"It's not that simple." It was me talking, but it was the ghoulish reincarnation of me, the one who'd died and come back to life with a vengeful mind and his own fiendish taste of rich boy entitlement.   
  
"I didn't even know you were alive."   
  
"But you'll tell someone I am. Maybe the kid who killed Gakuto – maybe you'll tell him. He put a knife in his back, he did god-knows-what with what I left behind. You love him? Here?" I gestured at the silvery head of hair with my gun. I saw deep breaths rocking the strong back in front of me.   
  
Shishido nodded.   
  
"Ohhhh…" I laughed coldly and smiled like a demon. I fired off a shot before I even knew what I was doing, but I was glad I did. With a bullet in his shin, the guy with a gun to Atobe's head crumpled to the floor like a sack of potatoes and I'd fulfilled my desire to harm someone else's precious thing. Maybe he wasn't the one who deserved it…in fact, I knew he wasn't…but fuck it.   
  
Atobe passed me a sideways glance as pandemonium broke out. Using the window of opportunity created by the chaos, Jirou wrestled Shishido for the gun, and managed to take it as Shishido wrestled just to get over to his lover. "Choutarou!" He screamed, and I realized I'd never hurt someone, before, without knowing his or her name. Let's do that next time, I wanted to tell Atobe, let's not even bother with names. Let's not bother with faces, if we can. It cuts down on a lot of the trouble.   
  
The wound wasn't fatal, and Shishido knew this, but what was turning him into an absolute mess was knowing that he'd lost. He clutched at Choutarou's face and tried to keep him lucid and I watched the blood pour out of his wound and soak up into Atobe's carpet in what would be the final crime scene known to this old place.   
  
I spoke to Jirou, first. "You're in charge of him. Think you can take him?" My pointing finger referred to Shishido.   
  
In the moment it took Jirou to think of something to say, Atobe interrupted. "He's actually quite useful in a fight, if the match is fair. I think this counts. The last one obviously didn't."   
  
"Jirou's in charge of Shishido. Let's get packed. Call the airstrip."  
  
I was accustomed enough to the cacaphonous volley of anguish and panic, and pain. That hardly fazed me as Jirou pulled Shishido away and dragged him out of the picture kicking and screaming. Choutarou reached after him, his face tormented and also mad as hell. He was trying to crawl, but the pain must have been intolerable. He'd pass out before he could manage to keep up with this chaos.  
  
"There's something above the sink that might help," Atobe informed Jirou as he found his cell phone between the cushions of the couch where we'd been enjoying a talk less than an hour ago. How quickly everything can turn on its nose. Atobe looked happy for the first time in years, but it was a very hard thing to see if you didn't know what to look for, "it's a little blue bottle. Try to put it in some water or he'll be out for days. I used to think I had to use that on you." He smiled after Jirou. The pacification of a prisoner was par for the course. We were simply going on a family vacation.   
  
Halfway up the stairs, I stopped and held out my hands, framing the scene as if it were a photograph. Fuji would have liked this if he were any sort of legitimate photographer. I always preferred candid, journalistic photography to his stilted, overwrought creations. Maybe I'd take up a new hobby when we reached the Island. Maybe a new photo to replace that damned portrait in the foyer. Definitely that, actually.  
  
We'd be hundreds of miles from the Empire's city when Atobe called up the news on his laptop on the beach. Jirou would be nuzzling a still-drugged Shishido beneath the canopy of a planted umbrella, and I'd ask what could have made Atobe drop his drink like that. He would curse as he cleaned the bourbon off of his seersucker shorts, and then he'd announce the two obituaries, side-by-side on the newspaper's website. There was Nanjirou Echizen, age 38 of Trenton, New Jersey. Found dead in his home, confirmed suicide by the police. "New Jersey?" I would ask. "That's pretty far off."  
  
"Hell," Atobe would reply in an odd tone, "you can pay enough money to have an obituary printed in any local paper. Survived by one son, local resident Ryoma Echizen, 16."  
  
"Fuck. Suicide, like Hell."   
  
"That's nothing."   
  
The other obituary declared that Genichirou Sanada, 28, had been murdered in his own casino's hotel.  
  
-END-


End file.
